developer.* Blogs - Quality - Comments

12 days in jail for a nonexistent bomb threat owing to DST bugs?

Edward G Nilges — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 22:40:38 -0700

What's really nuts is giving the kid a 12 day jail sentence EVEN IF he had really phoned in a bomb threat. In former times, kids who got in trouble as first time offenders were let off with a warning, but today, grownups, who haven't grown up, are frightened of their own kids.

Terrorism? Give me a break. All this "zero tolerance" failed to prevent the killings at Virginia Tech because it makes human time bombs into things undeserving of help in advance of going off.

Kid probably has a lawsuit for wrongful arrest but unless he has a rich Daddy as did those kids at Duke wrongfully accused, it'll go nowhere.

I am glad to be out of America.

The ultimate DST bug?

Daniel Read — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 16:45:55 -0700

This may be the ultimate Daylight Savings Time "bug": Kid wrongly imprisoned for bomb threat - error due to Daylight Savings Time.

Dan

DST is a problem even in Hong Kong...

Edward G Nilges — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 01:12:03 -0800

If your workday has to coincide with financial markets.

Don't trust the date time control in Windows XP if you are working in Europe or Asia, and you want to call your Mom, and you don't want to wake her up. Go to an online site in the USA that is DST change aware.

DST Embedded Everywhere

Daniel Read — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 06:48:04 -0800

I came across this bulletin today about the DST bug that is going to appear in a few days in a Sirius satellite radio model called the Stiletto. This underlines for me how pervasive this problem is, and makes me wonder whether lawmakers really thought this through before passing this law (I suppose that's a stupid question...of course they didn't!).

How long will it take the theorized energy savings from this move to exceed the losses by businesses in implementing this change? It's easy to throw stones at companies that are having trouble implementing and supporting patches, but the sure didn't ask for this.

This, in an ironic way, points back to one of the original points of my DST post (see top of thread), which I wrote long before I had heard any talk about the 2007 DST change that's causing so much uproar as I write this comment: DST bugs seem to bite software shops and enterprises twice a year, year after year. This year's DST issue is just an extreme sort. Next year we'll go back to normal, everyday DST bugs, which (in parts of the world where DST applies) will probably be with us forever.

An excerpt from the Stiletto bulletin:

At 2 a.m. Sunday, March 11, 2007, Daylight Saving Time (DST) starts three weeks earlier than usual in a federally mandated effort to save energy. At this time, the Stiletto 10 and 100 will not be able to automatically compensate for this recent change. If you live in a time zone which observes DST the time on your Stiletto will be one hour behind until April 1st, the previously observed beginning of DST. On April 1st, 2007, the time setting on the unit will be corrected.

In general, your device will continue to operate normally during the brief period the time setting is incorrect. There will be no impact to your ability to receive programming or use the LOVE function. However, if you intend to use timer recordings during this period, you will need to take steps to compensate for this offset.

I wish I had me a LOVE function!

Dan

An Aparent Mess with Microsoft DST Patches

Daniel Read — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 08:14:18 -0800

The saga continues with the current Windows DST switchover: Mary Jo Foley of the "All About Microsoft" blog relates the tale of user woes with the DST patches.

Dan

Lazing about in the 'extra' sun

Ron Porter — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 08:02:54 -0800

I can almost understand the whole DST thing in places where daylight is at a premium. Frankly, I'd be unhappy if SK ever decided to implement DST on our current timekeeping. I already spend a good part of late spring and early summer going to bed while it's still pretty light out. And I'm not a particularly early-to-bed kind of guy; anywhere in the last 2 hours before midnight is actually pretty typical around here. If anything, it might be nice to do DST in winter instead of summer so that we could actually get a chance to see the sun once in a while.

DST

Edward G Nilges — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 18:01:24 -0800

This year (2007) daylight savings time is changing and this is giving a lot of sysadmins a lot of extra work: cf. http://tf.nist.gov/timefreq/general/dst.htm for the new rules, which apply only to the USA.

Here in China, we don't have DST. Also, all of China is on ONE time, which makes for some weirdness in its western provinces but simplifies communication. China is approximately as wide as the United States with its four time zones.

Hong Kong users can manually or with software synchronize their systems with the clock in use at the HK Observatory, and similar systems are available in the USA.

Question is whether DST saves any energy at all. It's fun to have extra hours of daylight after work especially in the northernmost cities of the USA, where you can laze in the dying sun of Seattle. But that day in Spring when an hour is taken out of your life is no fun (especially if you forget), and by fall, when you get it back, the pain is forgotten.

Vista handles the new rules already, but the thought of upgrading to Vista because it handles new DST is a tail most assuredly wagging a big old dog.

Windows DST Updates

Daniel Read — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 15:51:54 -0800

Since a lot of people are coming to this post from the search engines looking for information about the March 11/April 11 DST upheaval, I thought this link might be helpful and interesting; the link points to a ZDNet blog post by Mary Jo Foley about the upcoming Windows changes for the early DST switchover.

Best,
Dan

working software <-> good software

Sven Busse — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 00:47:48 -0800

Hi,

reading your article, Dan and then the comments, i feel, two things here might be mixed up. For me, the original apgar score sounds like a good way to see, if the baby is actually well and alive, to see, if the baby is 'working'. The apgar score doesn't tell you, if the brain has any damage, if the kidney is working and many more things. So i think, the apgar score is good in telling, if the baby will survive the next days but it cannot tell, if the baby will develop to a healthy grown-up, and i guess, it wasn't meant to.

The same is for software. We already have instruments for knowing, if a program 'works'. Unit Testing, for example. Unit tests have the binary system, that you mentioned. It tells you, if that thing is running or not. But of course, it doesn't tell you, if the design of the software is good, if the architecture is good.

It is the same, as the apgar score doesn't tell you, if the baby has a high potential of getting cancer in the future.

To get this information, the baby would have to be checked very intensively and the resulting report would surely consist of many subjective opinions.

The same goes for analyzing a programm in terms of desgin and architecture.

My 2 cents :o)

Cheers

Sven

Google Video

Steve Benz — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 19:05:57 -0800

That was quite an interesting talk! At one point the speaker calls out data that seems to conclusively show that, almost all of the time, the committer turns out to be a useless predictor of whether a commit will be buggy or not.

Honestly, I'm not entirely surprised. I think good programmers can be as error prone as bad ones. What I think distinguishes a good programmer from a bad one is the survivability of their code. That is, the good coder will check in reusable components that last in the product, unchanged, for many years. The bad programmer will treat each new challenge as a separate entity and never write much code that is reused. When their code does persist, it's usually because it becomes dead code.

The vaguaries of Value

Steve Benz — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 18:57:33 -0800

Those are some excellent points! There are quite a few crappy programmers who can't write a correct line of code to save their lives but they at least know what code needs to be written. Lots of good programmers, myself included, will freely go off into the bushes and solve the wrong problem.

Indeed this magic tool would be blind to detect people who exerted influence over the code but did not actually write it or check it in themselves.

So if you you did decide to install the orbital death ray option, you would throw some wheat out with the chaff. Further, there are plenty of great programmers who, through bad luck or bad politics, end up working on backwater projects.

While I've couched this argument as theoretical, it's by no means out of reach to construct a tool that would approximate how much value is delivered to the customer by each line of code. (All you have to do is get a count of each time a function is used, and by which user, then collate that with amount each user pays to use your system.)

But I can't help but observe that such a tool has not yet been written, even though the technology to do it has been there a while.

I personally conclude that it's because at some level, managers know they can't handle the truth...

Stockholders aren't the only decision makers

Edward G Nilges — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 08:02:11 -0800

They aren't the only stakeholders. The EMPLOYEE (as Marx pointed out) gives something, his time, which he can never recoup, as compared to the capitalist who gives only his money, which he can regain by further profitable ventures, or by going to money-lenders with a typical capitalist's credit-worthiness.

Mixed economies that successfully combine socialism and markets in fact implicitly recognize the massive "opportunity costs" that employees AS EMPLOYEES pay, a cost that was in Marx's Capital transcendent-with-respect-to (different in kind and not just in quantity) the money that the capitalist pays.

Considered in the irritatingly teutonic and abstract way of Marx, the employee "as such" gives his life-time to the firm and is given, in a Judas bargain, money in exchange (usually peanuts, but at this level, that's by the way).

Marx refused to acknowledge the universal validity of the equation "time is money" which is a fundamental saw of "the real world".

Note that I cannot express this Great Refusal in the language of economics because Marx is meta-economic. In fact, you have to READ literature to understand it.

In de Maupassant, the young girl works herself to death for years to pay off a debt for a diamond that is not a diamond: even if he didn't realize it, de Maupassant was exposing the falsity of the idea that we get a fair deal when our life's time is equated with a minimum wage job, or 50K per year.

Literature exposes us to the fact that there is no surd way (as in the opposite of absurd) to "map" our life time onto a proper salary.

And literature helps us to understand that if we slave for peanuts, we're cheated, but if we're massively overpaid, there almost always is some piper (workaholism, isolation, stress, marital breakdown) who must be paid.

This is because time isn't money.

This means that the stockholders cannot "buy" the employees but must treat them as equal human beings with full rights to recognition and respect.

American culture is ridden, especially in the Sunbelt, with a nostalgia for slavery: a desire to buy a man's time and make him your slave, with "no rights that a white man need respect", in Chief Justice Roger Taney's words in Dred Scott.

Well, you can pay me anything you like...I am not your slave, and if after due diligence I think your system needs error checking, if only for my own sanity, I think this demand deserves equal recognition and respect.

An effective data system is the product of a conversation among equals: rough consensus and working code.

Steve's Code-O-Rama Magic Tool

Edward G Nilges — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 07:45:53 -0800

The whole idea cries out for Structuralist analysis.
In the grammar of ALL documents about the evaluation of programmers we find:

(1) The User is always spoken of in the singular

(2) The Programmers are always a collective and spoken of in the plural

THIS IS SIGNIFICANT.

In reality, as I have said again and again, the Users are plural and their needs conflict (furthermore their needs are alienated because they are agents of the firm).

In reality, solitary programmers often do a helluva job because they don't have to play footsie, grab ass, Trivial Pursuit, Staff Meeting, and Who's the Schmuck with "co-workers".

I suppose the extra-cost Laser Death Ray is attached to Steve's contraption in order to nail "nonproducing" programmers. But as I have said, a meaningful job is a human right, and, after a company has done due diligence in hiring a man, the company owes it to him and his family to rectify THEIR mistake if he can't code, by moving him to a slot in which he can produce.

[The "sexist" language is used advisedly: single mothers are smart cookies and can substitute the name of woman if they like, I just don't give a damn anymore. A "man" is someone on whom people depend considered most abstractly, and its high time to honor the poor slobs on who most people depend, slobs with dicks in most cases.]

Furthermore, if your team consists of nothing but Ace Venturas, it can still produce dreck, especially if the user is just kidding about the requirements, which he is in about 50% of all cases.

Magic Analyzers

Daniel Read — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 15:45:41 -0800

I'm struggling a little bit with how to respond to your idea, Steve, but I do have a couple of raw reactions...

I'm not sure if we're talking about things "the customer" really wants, at least not specifically. Depending on who "the customer" is (an end user? a manager in charge of the end users? a stakeholder who could give a damn about the end users?), what he or she wants could be very different than what some other "customer" would want. To the extent that your question connects to the Apgar discussion, the way I think of it is that the customer wants "good quality." They don't want crap. Yes, the software needs to fulfill the specified requirements, but underneath that what the customer wants is not-crap. A person buying a chair wants a chair that is comfortable, but beyond that they are not thinking about "invisible" things like

When I think of the "score-able attributes" in an Apgar-like software scoring system, I'm thinking mostly of things that are "invisible" to non-technical stakeholders, but which can later come to bite everyone in the ass down the road, just like a chair that breaks after three months of sitting in it because the carpenter/factory/designer made crappy joints. To me the usefulness of the Apgar idea for software is for technical people to judge a piece of software and tell stakeholders whether what they have is a piece of crap or not. This puts the at odds with the obstetrics Apgar, which as others have pointed out, measures things that are obvious to everyone, and not just trained medical personnel.

In imagining a perfect, magical code analysis machine, I'm stuck feeling like science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick, who would only have been able to imagine how something seemingly perfect and magical could be misused and/or flawed, as depicted in the movie adaptations of his stories such as Minority Report, Blade Runner, and Total Recall. This makes it hard to get into the spirit of the exercise as you've suggested it. :-)

If I do try hard to imagine it, though, I don't think I would want to apply such a machine as you've described it to evaluate *people* and how much they contribute to the bottom line--but my reasons for that go back to the reasons why I have trouble imagining such a machine.

Dan

For example...

Edward G Nilges — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 21:45:34 -0800

...I would refuse to use CVS to find the bum whose code is delta'd alot.

"No Bad Programmers".

There are no bad programmers in the sense that it is a major waste of time to Find the Bad Programmer.

It's a waste of time because the white collar employee will turn, in a game of Find the Schmuck, away from doing a good job and into the job of Not Looking Like a Schmuck.

There are no bad programmers. Or, if you like, I've written a lot of code. Blame me for all your problems.

But there is a bad society, one in which the electorate was systematically lied to for six years.

Don't get me started, in other words.