Max Kanat-Alexander

This was originally part a message I wrote to somebody, but I thought that some other people might appreciate it, so I'm re-posting it here with some minor edits.

When people make decisions, they do so mostly based on their experience and education. If we grew up in a society that taught us violence as the primary solution, then most people would be using that as their primary solution unless their experience strongly dictated otherwise. If a friend said something that you thought was true, that could be something that helped you make decisions in the future, just like if somebody read the Bible and thought that was true. Those are both education.

A large number of the people I know from the Western Hemisphere rant against the evils of what they call "organized religion." ( Read more... )

In the same vein as my previous blog (which most likely you haven't read yet since I'm writing these one-after-another):

Often, musicians want to be "unique" and "different."

Now, personally, I'm already kind of "unique" as a person, myself, and I know that I really don't have any desire to conform, largely because "conforming" would involve being stupid, unhappy, and unsuccessful, while pretending to be the opposite, and I'm just not down with that. If conforming meant being intelligent, having my own personality, being successful, and being happy, then I would be right there with the "in" crowd!

I'm different because I'm me--I'm not just being different for its own sake, rejecting anything just because other people think or do it. I can make up my own mind. Automatically rejecting anything popular would be its own form of slavery.

And this is where we get back to music. A certain percentage of musicians have got the idea that pretty music is way too conformist for them, and have instead decided to make noise and call it music. That's very cool, guys. You're so...cool. The Emperor's clothes are totally invisible, but they sure are cool clothes.

I'm not some granny ranting about rock and roll. I'm talking about crazy people. I'm sorry if I just linked to your hero and called him a crazy person, but...he was a crazy person.

Now, crazy is primarily an issue of definitions. That is, if I see a cat, and I call it a cat, I'm sane. If I see a table and I call it a cat, I'm crazy. Similarly, if I randomly throw cans down stairs and I call it noise, I'm sane. If I call it music, I'm crazy. If I create works of color and form and call it art, even if they're strange, I'm at least somewhat sane. If I splatter paint on canvas and call it art, I'm crazy.

Yes, there is a matter of perspective. But it's only the matter that if everybody looked at a table and called it a cat, they'd think I was crazy if I called it a table. That is, the general agreement as to what something is determines what it is, and you can go on "being unique" and calling it whatever you want, but that is crazy.

The most obnoxious form of insanity is knowing and perceiving that it's a table and yet insisting that it's a cat. If you compose noise, it's pretty obviously noise.

Anyhow, the actual point I was trying to get at is that there's nothing wrong with writing pretty music. It can still be your own pretty music. If you're a great classical composer, there's nothing wrong with writing some great classical compositions! Sure, you don't have to follow all the rules that Mozart did, but that doesn't mean that you have to go whole hog and throw out everything just to be different. The rules, the forms, those things are your tools of expression. Don't kill them, be expressive with them!

-Max

I'm guessing that in an insane asylum, the inmates can tell that the other inmates are crazy, because they're not all crazy in the same way. But I bet if they all had the exact same (or similar enough) problems, they would be unable to tell that anybody was crazy--their problems would be so common that the problems themselves would define "normal". They might notice a few things wrong (most likely with themselves), but if they all had the major aspects of the insanity in common, they probably wouldn't notice it in each other.

It's kind of like being in a gigantic prison (one so big most people can't see the walls), and then the prison's inside of a big box, and the big box is surrounded by an illusion, and then outside the illusion there's a glass cage. (That's not an analogy for something real, I'm just making stuff up to demonstrate a point.) You could convince somebody that they were in a prison--if you could show them the walls--and they might have some idea about the big box (they might have to take it on faith, if they couldn't get out of the prison to see), but trying to convince them about the illusion or the glass cage would be nearly impossible. And honestly, to somebody in a huge prison, the idea of the illusion or the glass cage would probably be overwhelming--they'd be like, "So even if I get out of here, there's all THAT? Wow, I don't want to think about that."

What would get really crazy is if you had seen the big box, the illusion, and the glass cage for yourself, and then you went back to the prison and had to chat it up with everybody about prison life. You know, who was at the top of the social ladder that day in prison, how many packs of cigarettes Joe was planning to get tomorrow, Bill's plans for building a shack in the yard. Wouldn't that just seem so stupid after a while?

But you couldn't go around saying to everybody, "Hey, you're in prison! And there's a big box out there! And then if you keep going, there's really amazing, beautiful stuff outside this glass cage!" What would people think of you? They'd think that you were crazy. Of course, you'd probably think that they were crazy, running around building up their social status in this little prison, but hey, the majority rules.

Still, if nobody was outside the prison, you'd hang out in it, because it'd be pretty lonely out in the big box, and even worse if you were outside the illusion. And you'd go on, day after day, talking about Joe's cigarettes and Bill's shack, but at least you'd have friends! And friends are really important. So important that people will stay in a gigantic prison just to have them, sometimes.

Anyhow, I just thought that was an interesting viewpoint to think about. Kind of makes me wonder what gigantic prisons surrounded by big boxes that we're in--mentally, in life, or in society.

-Max

In my experience, one of the differences between stupid people and smart people is that stupid people will try to figure things out and come up with some erroneous conclusion, and smart people will just say, "I don't understand that." Stupid people will assume that they do understand (or at least get very busy pretending like they do), and smart people know when they don't.

Often, in my classes in school, I would be the only person raising my hand and saying, "Hey, I don't understand X about this." Sometimes there would be 200 people in the class, and I was the only person who actually had the intelligence to admit that I didn't understand something.

The first prerequisite to learning something is admitting that you don't already know it.

-Max

The most common error that I come across when reading essays about computer programming is: discussing the wrong thing. The other two really common problems I run across are faulty assumption and scope too limited. So sometimes people actually discuss the right thing, but then it goes off in some crazy direction, or the right thing is hidden in a bunch of crazy assumptions and a bunch of narrow views.

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A friend just pointed out this post, to me. :-) I'm honored to be showing up on Coding Horror. :-) It's funny, because I was just thinking of adding it to my aggregator the other day.

Anyhow, this is my response:

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-Max

Now and again I've seen the statement that a particular programming language is designed to work like "the way that people think."

Let's ignore for a second that the authors have no idea how the mind functions, and that this is an unsubstantiated claim.

What I was thinking about is whether or not you'd want a programming language that works in the same way that you think.

Programming is actually a way of communicating with the computer. You're telling it what to do. So, I think the most popular, successful programming languages work in the same way that people communicate to each other, not the same way that they think.

I think this is why most people can wrap their minds more easily around procedural programming languages--that's how we talk: in order (for the most part). Languages that can be read in the same direction you'd read a sentence are the easiest to read.

Of course, you have to consider that grammar is different across different languages, but I doubt that there's any language grammar that reads like Lisp, for example.

This may also be a clue as to why some people have difficulty grasping object-oriented design. Communication isn't really designed around general classes of objects with more specific classes that have all the properties of the parent. I mean, these word classes exist, but I'm not sure whether or not people actually relate those things. That may be a way of thinking, but it's unrelated to a way of communicating, other than that words are capable of describing classes of objects.

That doesn't mean that Lisp isn't a good programming language. And I certainly believe that object-oriented design is the right way to design programs. But they both can be a bit difficult to teach people sometimes, and I think this is a clue as to why.

-Max

I think in our society if something seems inexplicable, we're likely to just disregard it. That is, if it can't be explained, it's just not there at all. This is particularly true with technical people, since we're often of a somewhat scientific mindset--"if it can't be explained, it's probably not true."

But there is a certain kind of inexplicable magic that happens in the world, sometimes. To me it's not inexplicable--perhaps that's why I notice it or actually believe it's there. But probably to most people it's just "weird coincidence," and that does put a bit of the magic back into existence. :-)

I'm talking here mostly about the magic of connection with people--how people meet, become friends, or stay friends.

For example, Casey Jackson, my best friend in the whole world, was just randomly paired with me as a roommate, when I was a freshman in college. Nobody else had a roommate that they got along with so well, just us, so it's not like "they were just good at matching people."

ritos_revenge I met through the Internet, just randomly because she had a profile that said she was in Palo Alto because she was going to be there that summer. Out of 300 people I met through that same site, she's the only good friend I made. Later she coincidentally worked with the same organization that I contract with primarily, in the department that I contract with. Now she's most likely going to work with an organization that I spend almost all my time working with. As she said to me recently, our paths just keep inexplicably crossing.

heartichoke tried to get my attention with some determination during the first quarter of school in 2000, but I somehow failed to notice. Instead, I actually met her because a girl I had briefly dated played the violin, and when I asked that girl if she would play for me, she said she wasn't good enough, but heartichoke was. It was only later that heartichoke pointed out to me how she had tried to get my attention for quite some time before.

There are lots of stories like this, in my life at least. I could just go on and on. Some are more "explicable", others less so. :-) But there's a lot of magic in friends, I think. :-)

-Max

It seems like the health value of a piece of food is inversely proportional to how much effort it takes to acquire and consume it. Like, candy is easy to get at, and you can eat it really fast. A whole meal takes a long time to make, but is generally good for you. Fast food--also easy to acquire, but not good for you.

You'd think that somebody would be working to reverse that equation. I think many people are too focused on the profit or cash that they can make from selling people fast/difficult food to consider how important it is to society that people be well-fed.

-Max

I was recently called on by a client to explain some things about open source software to another contractor of theirs.

One of the questions that was brought up, and is often on the minds of people unfamiliar with open source, was "If people can see the source code, doesn't that mean people will find more security vulnerabilities?"

This idea maybe goes back to the days of castle warfare in the Dark Ages and before. The idea being that if you had the full blueprint plan of a castle, you could possibly find a weakness and invade that way.

Of course, with any degree of thought, that's ridiculous. When you design a castle, you should be designing a castle that nobody could break into, even if they had the full plans. That's a secure castle. If you're depending on the hope that nobody will ever steal the plans or find out your secret entrances, eventually somebody's going to break into your castle.

It's just a matter of time. If there's a way into your system, then given an infinite amount of time, the attacker will find a way in.

When you're building a castle, you should just put the plans on display before you build it, and ask every expert you can find, "Is this castle secure?" Maybe some random guy will come along and say, "Hey, this part of the castle needs to be improved." Then you improve it. Guess what, he found a security vulnerability that might not have been found if the plans weren't available. But it might have been found. This way, you fixed it before anybody invaded and killed you.

For people who design bad castles, this idea makes them extremely nervous. "I design bad castles and then everybody will be able to break in if they can see the plans!" I just wouldn't trust that guy to build my castle.

So most likely, people will certainly find more security vulnerabilities in open source software. A found vulnerability is a fixed vulnerability. That's secure software. Because it's open source, often the vulnerability is found and fixed before the product is even released, because people can look at the code while it's being written. With a closed-source product, mostly you have to wait until the product is released, and then it can be tested for security.

This doesn't mean that open-source software is always more secure than closed-source software. It just means that open-source software has more opportunities for security to happen.

You do have to keep up with the security updates for your open-source system, but that's true for any system! So that's no difference between open-source and closed-source programs.

If you don't have the code to your system, you can't know it's secure.

-Max

Computers are really event-based, and are designed like they're not.

I'll be a little clearer:

Computers exist to help humans do things. They do not exist to push around electricity or just to communicate with other computers or other pieces of technology. They exist to be interacted with by some person, somewhere.

I hope that's not news to you. But maybe it is! Some people are unaware that computers only do what people tell them to do. Computers don't really "think", they just blindly follow directions like a hypnotized moron.

So how are computers designed now? Okay, in brief, and simplified:

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There is no perfect programming language in existence today.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say there isn't really even a great programming language in existence today.

I've thought about it a lot, and here's what I think would be the requirements of a perfect programming language:

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I'm not a language designer--it's not really my passion or my thing. So you probably won't be seeing me writing any new languages. But I still think it's good to have a real-world idea of what a language should be, and not just the mathematical tomes of esoteric theoretical language-design concepts produced by the halls of academia.

-Max

ritos_revenge and I just finished watching Hotel Rwanda.

The movie made me very angry--not because there was anything wrong with the movie--in fact, it was quite historically accurate. What happened was that it reminded me of my studies of the Rwandan Genocide in college, and how the United Nations and the United States sat back and did nothing effectual while the fastest genocide in history killed 800,000 people in 100 days.

To compare, I've just done a bit of research. If you figure that the Holocaust started in 1938 and ended in 1945, if it had been as "efficient" as the Rwandan Genocide, it would have killed about 20 million Jews. There are only 13 million Jews on Earth today, of which I am one.

Let's give this another perspective. In the recent shootings at Virginia Tech, 33 students were killed. If we had two hundred and fifty identical school shootings every day for the next three months, we would equal the speed and death toll of the Rwandan Genicode.

After the movie, ritos_revenge posed the question of what makes people go insane as a group like that? And to her this was my response:

"The same sort of madness that allows a whole group of people to see genocide on television and then try to forget about it and eat dinner."

We are not so different, really. The Rwandan killers did not want to confront their own problems, the circumstances of their own lives and their own country. So they decided that it was somebody else's responsibility, and killed them. We do not want to confront their problems either, so we decide that it's somebody else's responsibility, and we let them die.

We are not a world unto ourselves. We are not an island of safety in a sea of chaos called "the rest of the world". The lines of nations are drawn by men, not by God or an act of Nature. If we are anything, we are citizens of Earth. There is no nation that is not a part of our world. We have a responsibility for this planet as a whole, not just for ourselves, or our own families, friends, and nations.

Right now, as I write this, there is genocide in Darfur, and something must be done.

You might say, "Oh, I'm sure that's all being handled." No, it isn't. As long as people are dying, it is not handled.

But even more likely, you might say, "Yes, you're right! That's terrible! But what can I do about it? I don't have any power over that. I can't fly there and help, and even if I could, what difference would I make?" And to that I say that actually, you're right--most likely, you can't fly over there. And maybe you wouldn't make much of a difference there. But that doesn't mean there's nothing that you can do about it.

Doing anything is better than doing nothing. Even if you just told a few people about it, that would be doing something. Even if you donated some money to a cause, or went to a meeting, that would be doing something. If enough people just told each other about the situation, just made others confront it and take at least some responsibility, we would have a world that couldn't help but act. If every American was aware of this and took even enough responsibility to tell their neighbors, it would become such a pressing political issue that no one in power could ignore it. That, in itself, is enough.

If somebody broke into your neighbor's house and started shooting, wouldn't you call the police? If your neighbors came to you dying of starvation, wouldn't you lend them some food?

Your neighbors are dying. Your neighbors are starving.

Won't you at least tell somebody?

-Max

When people use technical "buzzwords", it irritates me. However, I couldn't figure out exactly why until just now.

When you have a long series of technical positions, it is inevitable that at some point you will have a non-technical manager. Now, it's OK to have a non-technical manager--management is a skill of its own. The problem is non-technical managers who pretend to be technical, or make technical decisions. Even if you don't ever have that experience, it's almost certain that many of your friends will, and you will hear about it all the time.

So, in other words, every technical person is familiar, themselves or through others, with somebody who makes decisions that they shouldn't be making. We've all had to deal with or clean up the total disasters caused by that situation.

And here's one trait that almost all of these non-technical crazy people have: they don't know what they're talking about, but they know and use buzzwords. And they use them to order you to do ridiculous things. They say, "So-and-so is all the rage, so our product should now use so-and-so!!"

Think of any "fad" that you've ever thought was stupid. Now imagine that you had a manager who forced you to engage in that fad. Like, say, wearing striped tube tops. "All employees must now wear striped tube tops every day." After a while, any time in the future somebody said "tube tops", you'd think of that manager, and you'd get mad.

That's what happens with technical people, too! Eventually all buzzwords will start to become associated with "idiots who don't know what they're talking about", and then when you, a non-crazy person, mention some buzzword to a technical person, they'll get irritated, or stop listening to you, or suddenly seem less excited about their job.

What can you do instead? Just use plain English. If you want your website to look nice and work on everybody's computer, just say that you want it to look nice and work on everybody's computer, not that you want it to "use semantic XHTML and CSS 2 to create an engaging Web 2.0 experience".

Leave the technical words to the technical people, and just say what you mean, and everybody will be a lot happier.

-Max

You may or may not be interested to know a little bit about the history of the word "man."

It derives originally, basically, as a shortening of the word "human." It never meant "male" until about 1000 AD, and even then wasn't commonly used to mean "male" until much later.

The fact that writers talk about "man" when they mean "humankind" is not sexist, it's merely a tradition older than the modern common use of the word "man."

If you're good at reading derivations in dictionaries, you may be interested in this detailed derivation of the word man, and even if you're not good with them, there's a much simpler derivation in the Encarta (scroll down to the very bottom of the page).

-Max

You know, until you've lived for a little while, you don't think about how your significant others are going to look when they get older. I mean, they're probably going to look a lot like their parents.

Do you think their parents are cute? I hope so, brother, because that's what they're going to look like. I mean, maybe you can convince yourself, "Oh, no, they're not going to look like that." And then you wait like 10 years, and then you realize, "Oh wow, they look exactly like their parents, with some tiny differences."

Now, of course, people's tastes change as they get older, so the fact that they look "like an older version of themselves" is perfectly acceptable. But not all people grow up to be exactly "an older version of themselves." Some people go through strange and drastic changes, and become...their parents!

In any case, I'm lucky, because my parents are damn good-looking. My mother looks even better in her 50's than she did at 30.

Anyhow, this has struck me recently, and I was just thinking about it, so I figured I'd post about it. People can go through really striking physical changes, sometimes!

-Max

I've often thought about this, but I've never really put my thoughts down in writing, or even expressed them particularly.

There's a very popular image that computer programmers and technicians are:

• Reclusive
• Lacking in social skills
• Not good at communicating
• Only interested in engineering and other "geeky" things like video games
• Not athletic

I'd like to put that myth to rest, right now.

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Every so often, somebody comes with with some new buzzword to describe some "new method" of programming.

Manager-types latch on to these terms, because they know nothing about programming, but they know all about buzzwords. Also, because they know nothing about programming, they think that all this market-speak from somebody selling something actually has to do with something technical.

Let me make this clear, right now. There are three real methods of programming that I know of:

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Once upon a time, Bugzilla was an internal application at Netscape, written in TCL. When it was open-sourced in 1998, Terry (the original programmer), decided to re-write Bugzilla in Perl. My understanding is that he re-wrote it in Perl because a lot of system administrators know Perl, so that would make it easier to get contributors.

In 1998, there were few advanced, object-oriented web scripting languages. In fact, Perl was pretty much it. PHP was at version 3.0, python was at version 1.5, Java was just starting to become well-known, ruby was almost unheard of, and some people were still writing their CGI scripts in C or C++.

Perl has many great features, most of all the number of libraries available and the extreme flexibility of the language.

However, Perl would not be my first choice for writing or maintaining a large project, such as Bugzilla. The same flexibility that makes Perl so powerful makes it very difficult to enforce code quality standards or to implement modern object-oriented designs. Here are the problems:

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I was never really a "child," so when people "act like children," I don't understand it.

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