Category Archives: Meta thoughts

Rolling Back

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve had a number of thoughts rolling around my head lately and they’re somewhat related so here goes.

I’m going to start with a depressing headline and URL: Civilization will end in 2050. Ok, perhaps that’s more of an alarmist headline than anything else. I posted this elsewhere, and some folks correctly pointed out that this could have been written by Thomas Malthus over two centuries ago.  And it’s true; prognosticators have predicted the fall of humans since probably before recorded history.  How many of us recall in the last century alone predictions of world-wide famine, a world-wide ice age, comets smashing into us and other horrible events.

Some were prevented, such with the Green Revolution. Some were corrected with better data or a better understanding of the data. Some where just… nuts.  That said, some predictions can be made with 100% certainty, even if the bounds on the actual circumstances are fuzzy. I’ve been giving this particular nugget a lot of thought.  Since I’ve passed that magical (at least to humans) mark of a half-century, I’ve given more thought to what I call my expiration date. It’s a fact. At some point I will cease all biological functions and will be dead.  I can’t escape that. Every day the odds increase a very tiny percentage.  So, I am predicting my own death, most likely sometime in the next 1/2 century. There’s a very slight possibility it could be tomorrow, and a much greater chance it could be 40 years from now, and based on current medicine an absolute certainty 80 years from now.  You’ll note I hedged that last one. It’s quite possible in the next few decades we figure out how to extend the human lifespan by decades if not centuries.  But I’m not counting on it. And even then, there are no guarantees I’m not hit by a driver while biking or some other catastrophic event.

That said, right now I’d say the odds are decent I’ll be alive in 2050. And almost certainly my kids will be (and very likely I’ll have grandkids by then).  So, am I worried that the world will end in 2050? Yes and no. For one thing, there’s time between now and then for a lot to happen. But, as we get closer, it’s going to be harder and harder to forestall the impacts of higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans. Yes, to be clear, I believe the evidence supports that humans are greatly impacting the climate via CO2 and other emissions.

But I’m also optimistic that we’ll work harder, especially as things get worse, to stave off the most pessimistic scenarios. But it won’t be easy and the longer we wait, the harder it will be.

While anecdotal, I’ve already seen the impacts in my life, earlier springs, caves that once held ice year round no longer do, less snow in the winters, etc. It worries me. But I also still have some hope.

That said, an analogy that’s been rolling around in my head that isn’t 100% perfect but fits me as a DBA.

Many of us in the SQL server community have started a long running transaction, only to realize we’ve brought the server to a halt. In other words, no other user can access their data until our transaction is complete. We can abort the transaction, but if we wait too long, that can be a far worse solution than trying to stop it early on. For the non geeks, in other words, if our transaction is going to update 1 billion records and we realize 5 minutes in that it will take 10 hours, we can abort it and it should take about 5 minutes to rollback to the original state. This means we’ve only brought the server to a halt for about 10 minutes. However, if we ignore the problem, and keep pretending it’ll go away and we wait say 9 hours and then finally decide, “oh what the heck, let’s try to fix the problem now” it might take another 9 hours to rollback. In other words, by waiting to long to resolve the problem, instead of being 10 minutes, it can be 1080 minutes.

In other words, the longer you wait, the harder it can be to recover. I think that’s where we’ll be at by 2050. Whether or not I’m still alive (though I plan to be!)

Being Observant

Posted on by
Reply

I was busy last week teaching cave rescue at the annual National Cave Rescue Commission Weeklong training seminar, hence my lack of a post last week.

As always, I had a great time helping to teach a class of 19 students. Our teaching includes classroom time as well as time in the field. We use both caves (obviously) and cliffs for out in the field instruction. The cliffs give us an opportunity to focus on rigging and lets everyone see what’s going on; mostly. In a cave, often it’s too dark and small to let everyone have a good few.  But, you may notice that I said mostly above.

Let me interrupt with a quick video.  Can you count the number of times the players dressed in white pass the basketball? If you got 15, congrats.

Now back to the class being on the cliffs. As part of our exercises, we usually do several iterations of the same thing, such as lowering a patient and then raising them up. Each time we may change a detail or two, such as where they can rig, what haul system to use, etc. The idea is that repetition helps them learn the skill. Often though, at the last iteration we toss in a wrinkle: they’re not allowed to speak, at all. Generally this means, they have to start with a pile of rope and hardware on the ground and without saying a word, rig a safe system to lower and raise a patient.  Generally they use a variety of hand signals and various body motions. While at times it can be quite entertaining, it can also be instructional. It’s often the faster iteration of the day, in part because they’ve honed their skills but also due in a large part because there’s no ideal chit-chat.

The point of the exercise is multi-fold. Partly it’s a great challenge for them that they end up really enjoying. It also illustrates that communication is still possible when you can’t verbalize things. This is actually often common in caves where rushing water or echos can make vocalizations useless. It finally shows that they’ve come together as a team and can work effectively.

That said, sometimes they can miss details. As instructors we ensure though that no safety issues are missed. We will stop the exercise if we see something unsafe and help them make it safe.  Part of this includes an instructor on a separate rope to hang over the edge so they can watch the patient (generally another instructor) go down and come back up. This instructor watches the entire process for safety reasons.

This time around, we decided to add a bit of a twist to the exercise.  Generally the safety instructor stays at the top. This time however, he rappelled over the edge, all the way to the bottom. Nothing overly unusual about that.

However, once he was at the bottom, along with the patient, who happened to be me, I very quickly detached the ropes connected to my harness and connected them to his harness. I then moved over to the line he had been on and started to ascend as the students began to haul him up.

They eventually got him to the top and congratulated themselves on a job well done. Other than the student at the edge of the cliff who had watched the process, none of them appeared to notice that they had lowered me and raised him.

This actually isn’t totally surprising. We like to think of the human brain as a computer, but in many ways it’s not. Or at least it’s not a digital one with perfect recall. We actually ignore a lot of “noise” in order to focus on what’s important at the time. The fact that the person they hauled up was different from the person they had lowered counts as noise in this case because it’s so improbable that the brain won’t bother processing it, lest it take away from more important tasks, like ensure the ropes were handled safely.

And for those of who you didn’t watch the video, the answer is 15, but that’s not what’s important. Go watch it.

Today’s takeaway, our brains are fuzzy and work “well enough” most of the time, but can miss details. And generally, that’s ok.

Marshmallows Part II

Posted on by
Reply

I’ll have to admit, I can rarely tell in advance when one of my posts will hit all the buttons and generate views and when it’ll fall flat. But as I don’t always write for my audience, sometimes I write for my own reasons, I can live with that.

So, how to follow-up on a post that didn’t receive many views, write a follow-up post. You can call me a slow learner.

Actually, it’s about learning. Last time I wrote about my microwave and doing a quick experiment with marshmallows to prove it was really dead.  After 2 days without a microwave it was time to get a new one. Of course I couldn’t get what I wanted because the space it had to fit into was limited in size.  That could have been resolved, but would have meant redoing the cabinet space it had to fit into. And if I were going to redo the cabinet space there, I might as well redo the rest of the cabinets. And if I’m going to redo the cabinets, I really need to redo the counters. And very quickly a replacement $100 microwave I can get in an hour would become a 3-week $10,000 kitchen remodel. I opted for the $100 microwave over the one I really wanted.

And the results are shown at the top of post (and below in case the top doesn’t appear)

melted marshmallow picture

10 seconds of marshmallows in the microwave

It’s quite interesting to me. The best heating was beyond the area of the rotating plate.  But this also shows the value of the rotating plate since if there’s a few sports, if I put a something to heat and everything was stationary, it would take forever to heat since there’s little to no microwave energy there. (This can get complex because of the size of the wave and the height of the material, etc.)

Now, I’d have done more experiments, but it seems a certain someone in the house enjoys marshmallows more than I do and had eaten a bunch and this was all I had.

But, I have a working microwave and I’ve proven how important the rotating plate can be (not that I had much doubt).

And that’s science to me; doing experiments and learning.

Oh and about the SQL query I was updating. It’s going into production this week hopefully. I was about to eek out about a 10-20% improvement. Beyond that, not much I could do because it really ends up scanning an entire table, on purpose.  Only so much you can do there.

One last thing: there may not be a post next week because I’ll be teaching at the NCRC weeklong cave training class in Indiana and will have limited internet and time.

Marshmallows

Posted on by
2

Though I attended RPI, which is generally considered an engineering school, my degree is a BS in Computer Science. I say that because I consider myself more of a scientist than an engineer at times. And honestly, we all start out as scientists, but many of us lose that along the way.

Anyone who has had a small child has observed a scientist in action. No, they’re not in a lab full of test tubes and beakers and flasks giving off noxious smells. But they are in the biggest lab there is, the world. They also don’t necessarily realize it. Nor do parents. But every time they drop a Cheerio, they’re testing gravity.  Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on your point of view) so far every time they’ve managed to prove that gravity works. This is the most obvious example, but when you stop to think about it, much of the first few years of life is all about experimenting. Most of the time it goes well, but sometimes, as a burnt hand will attest, the experiment has a less than ideal outcome.

And it’s the fear of burned hands that leads to parents to utter that common  refrain, “Don’t touch that!” or the variation “Don’t do that!”.  Soon, over time, our experimentation starts to get reined in until we do very little of it. This can be inhibiting.

Years ago I used to teach an “Introduction to Windows” adult education class. It was I believe a 6 week class and I taught several over the course of a couple of years. It didn’t take me long to realize the biggest constraint on the students ability to succeed in the class was that they had internalized “Don’t do that, you might break something.” Once I realized that, half my teaching pedagogy simply became, “Touch that, you won’t break it, and if you do, it’s not a big deal, and if it is, we’ll fix it anyway.” Seriously, more than anything else, I had to encourage most of my students to experiment with the computer.

More recently I realized I had stopped doing as many experiments in my life as I should be doing. About 1.5 weeks ago I attended a Wilderness Medicine Conference a friend of mine had told me about. At the end of the very wet, cold, rainy day, a bunch of us went outside and tried to start a fire. Starting a fire, let alone in such conditions was something most of the students had never done. I had, but not in years. With some effort, and experimentation, including using the outside box of a single serving size package of Fruit Loops, we finally managed to get the fire going.

But this got me thinking. When I go hiking, I carry a tiny ziplock back in my jacket with some firestarting materials. They’re there in case of an emergency. But, the thing is, I had never actually tried them and realized if I didn’t know how well they worked in practice, I couldn’t rely on them in emergency. So, I went outside, and started a fire. And I learned that yes, my materials ARE adequate, but the dryer lint needed to be pulled apart more than I realized. I tried again later in the week, and added the use of a toilet paper roll to form sort of a chimney so the starting fire would draft better. This, and the better pulling of the lint worked even better and a single match was sufficient this time.  This gave me more confidence that in an emergency, in less than ideal conditions I could get an actual fire going.

But, I wasn’t done! Our microwave broke this weekend. But, before I wrote it off, I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a fluke or something else. So, in this case I decided to get a bag of marshmallows and lay them out inside the microwave to see if I was getting ANY energy out of the magnatron. Turns out, nope, nada, nothing. So, today or tomorrow I will be buying a new microwave. But, it was a fun, and later tasty experiment.

Without delving deep into the scientific method here, I’ll say at a simple level, science is about having a hypothesis and testing it. The testing it is important.

To bring this back to SQL. First, you have a hypothesis that your backups will work. Have you tested that hypothesis? If not, do so immediately. Even if they do, you might learn something now that will be important when you have to do it for real. Perhaps you learn the volume your backups are on only has write access. Or perhaps you learn you need to retrieve your encryption keys and the person who controls access to them is on vacation. Or perhaps your RPO is 4 hours and the restore takes 6 hours.  So, experiment.

query plan

Capture of a random query plan

Recently for one client I’ve spent some time experimenting with various changes to help improve the performance of some queries. Not everything I tried worked, but some things did. So, again experiment.

I’m curious what recent experiments you may have done, SQL or otherwise. What were their outcomes?

 

Security: Close isn’t good enough!

Posted on by
2

I was going to write about something else and just happened to see a tweet from Grant Fritchey that prompted a change in topics.

I’ve written in the past about good and bad password and security polices. And yes, often bad security can be worse than no security, but generally no security is the worst option of all.

Grant’s comment reminded me of two incidents I’ve been involved with over the years that didn’t end well for others.

In the first case, during the first dot-com bubble, I was asked to partake in the due diligence of a company we were looking to acquire. I expected to spend a lot of time on the project, but literally spent about 30 minutes before I sent an email saying it wasn’t worth going further.

Like all dot-com companies, they had a website. That is after all, sort of a requirement to be a dot-com. And it was obvious it was backed by a database server (which I knew was SQL Server, which sped up my process, but only by a few minutes). So, I did the obvious thing and got the IP address of the web-site. Then, I simply tried to connect to SQL Server from my desktop to that IP address and one or two on either side of it. On my second attempt, the IP address right before the one of the website replied to my attempt to reach SQL Server. That was not a good sign. The reply meant there was no effective firewall in place. Note, had they not been using SQL Server, but some other tech, it might have taken me another 10-15 minutes to find the right client to connect. So knowing it was SQL Server wasn’t overly important.

But of course at least they had a password right? Well, back then, the latest and greatest version of SQL Server was 2000 which still did not require a password when you set it up.  I asked myself, “it couldn’t be that easy could it?”

Sure enough it was. Within minutes I had logged in as sa without a password. I now had complete control of their SQL Server. But even more so, back then SQL Server allowed unfettered access to xp_cmdshell. In theory at that point I could have done anything I wanted on the box, including installing remote access software and creating and giving myself administrator access.  I didn’t. But, my email to my boss was short and sweet. I explained how there was absolutely no way we could acquire their platform without a complete top to bottom review of it for any signs of malware. If it took me only 30 minutes or less to get in, I was almost certain their system was owned.

We never acquired that company. I’ve wondered since then what happened to them. My guess is, like many dot-com companies they folded. I can’t say it would have been because of their lack of security, but I can say that the lack of security played a huge factor in us NOT acquiring them. (and for the record, the company I worked for at the time ended up acquiring 1-2 other companies, merging with a 3rd and finally being acquired by a 4th, which is still around. So we were doing something mostly right.)

The second incident that comes to mind was about 8 years later at another start-up. I was asked by the COO to do some due diligence on the setup in another division’s datacenter setup. Again, I didn’t do anything fancy. I knew they weren’t running SQL Server, but I figured I could still do some probing. This time what I found was a bit different. It wasn’t software per se, but rather their iSCSI switch. Sure enough not only did it have a public facing IP address, but, the CTO of that division had failed to change the default password. I was very tempted at the time to give the IP address to my 8 year old son, without any other details and asking him to try to log in. Given his skills, even at that age, I’m 99% sure he’d have figured how to Google the required information and get in. But I figured I didn’t really need to do that to make my point.

That and other factors later lead to the CTO leaving the company.

Moral of the story: Make sure your sensitive information is under some form of lock and key and don’t use blank or factory default passwords, let you or your company end up in a headline like this one: Evisort Data Exposed.

Punditry

Posted on by
2

We’re all experts on everything. Don’t think so? Go to any middle school or high school soccer game and you’ll be amazed at how many parents are suddenly experts on soccer. It’s also amazing at how many parents are parents of future NCAA Division I scholarship soccer players.

Seriously though, we’re all guilty of this from time to time. I’ve done it and if you’re honest, you’ll admit you’ve done it.

Yesterday the world suffered a loss, the near destruction of Notre Dame.  Early during the fire our President tweeted:

“Perhaps flying water tankers could be used to put it out. Must act quickly!”

As many have pointed out, this was actually a terrible idea. The idea of dropping 100s of kilograms of water onto an already collapsing roof is most likely to do more damage than not. But, while I think it’s easy to mock the President for his tweet, I won’t. In some ways it reminds me of the various suggestions that were made last summer during the Thai Cave Rescue. We all want to help and often will blurt out the first idea that comes to mind.  I think it’s human nature to want to help.

But, here’s the thing: there really are experts in the field (or to use a term I see in my industry that I dislike at times: SME (it just sounds bad) Subject Matter Expert.)

And sometimes, being a SME does allow you to have some knowledge into other domains and you can give some useful insight. But, one thing I’ve found is that no matter how much I know on any subject, there’s probably someone who knows more. I’ve written about plane crashes and believe I have a more than passing familiarity in the area. Perhaps a lot more than the average person. But, there’s still a lot I don’t know and if I were asked to comment by a news organization on a recent plane crash, I’d probably demur to people with far more experience than I have.

Having done construction (from concrete work in basements to putting the cap of a roof on), I again, have more than a passing familiarity with construction techniques and how fire can have an impact. That said, I’ll leave the real building and fire fighting techniques to the experts.

And I will add another note: even experts can disagree at times. Whether it’s attending a SQL Saturday or the PASS Conference itself, or sitting in a room with my fellow cave rescue instructors, it can be quite enlightening to see the different takes people will have on a particular question. Often no one is wrong, but they bring different knowledge to the table or different experiences.

And finally, you know what, sometimes the non-expert CAN see the problem, or a solution in a way that an expert can’t. But that said, at the end of the day, I’ll tend to trust the experts.

And that’s the truth because I’m an expert on punditry.

Shouldn’t that be plugged in?

Posted on by
2

That was the question a friend of mine in 6th grade asked. As a result I developed what I call the Charlie M. rule after my friend. It was sort of Show and Tell day in 6th grade and we were supposed to talk about our hobbies. I brought in a circle of HO scale track (18″ radius for those interested) and my locomotive (a model GP-38) and some cars and of course the transformer to power it all.

I set it all up in front of the class and dutifully tried to demonstrate it. Nothing moved. I checked to make sure the engine was properly on the tracks: check. I made sure the wires were connected to the transformer: check. I made sure the wires were connected to the track: check.  I was stumped: check. Finally Charlie raised his hand and asked, “Shouldn’t that be plugged in?”  Ayup, in all my nervousness and being hurried, I had forgot the most basic step, of plugging in the transformer.

I try to keep this in mind when troubleshooting: check the obvious. I ran into this again over the weekend when trying to get my BMW Z3 running again. (Side note: no, consulting does not pay that well. This is one of the few tangible items I have left from my dad’s estate). It had stopped running late last fall and at the time I spent a little time trying to make it run, without much success. Finally, with the family’s help I pushed and pulled it into a shelter for the winter and then left it for the winter.

I wasn’t planning on worrying about it until later this month, but then… well let’s just say when I put the large box with metal corners into the rear of the Subaru, I forgot to check the obvious and slammed the rear hatch down on the box. Well, the box, realizing it didn’t have enough room, decided to take advantage of the metal corner and proceeded to make more room by punching out the rear window of the Subaru. Oops.  Such a simple mistake, but a large one.

So, while waiting for the Subaru to get fixed, I decided it was time to get the BMW on the road.

Now due to the symptoms, I knew it wasn’t a dead battery or bad gas. So taking advantage of what I call my extended brain, I asked others for help.  We had narrowed the problem down to either the clutch interlock switch or the starter. Neither looked like it would be an easy self-service and I was getting frustrated. I finally decided that perhaps checking the ODB-II codes might yield more information. Strangely though, the reader didn’t power up; there were no codes to read. That struck me as a strange. So here I did check the obvious: I took the reader to the Subaru and made sure the reader worked. And it worked fine on the Subaru. I went back to my extended brain and mentioned that.

“Oh, have you checked the fuses?”

“Nah I thought about it, but everything seems to have power.”

“You sure, sounds like the onboard computer fuse might be blown.”

So, I trudged out and took off the fuse cover.  Now, I don’t really believe in fate or signs from God, but it was weird, in the list of about 40 fuses, the first one my eyes fell on was Computer. “Nah, can’t be.”

I pulled it, and sure enough, it was burned out. I pulled it and replaced it. Got in the car and thought, “it can’t be that easy, can it?” A turn of the key and the next thing I knew, the 6 cylinders were purring.

All that work and frustration because I had overlooked the basics.

This is far from the first time I’ve overlooked the basics. And I bet you’ve done the same thing. I have a theory about why we do this, and it is in part because the basics ARE so fundamental that we assume it has to be something else. In my model train example, dirty track and loose wires, especially in an ad-hoc setup are arguably a more common issue than forgetting to plug in the transformer. In my BMW case, because literally everything else worked, I assumed the power was getting to the computer. And honestly, even now, thinking about it, I’m surprised the dash light startup didn’t change at all because of a lack of computer.

I’ve seen this in databases and elsewhere. I was recently trying to do a quick restore of a database from one machine to another and the obvious wasn’t working. It took me a bit to remember the client’s new security setup prevented this specific case for these two machines. Once I remembered that, the problem and subsequent solution were obvious.

This in part goes back to why I like using a rubber-duck at times. It can force you to review your assumptions and check the basics.

Having a problem? Employ the Charlie M. rule and check the basics.

 

JOBS THAT BEAT THE CARING OUT OF YOU

Posted on by
1

Let me start by saying this is NOT an April Fool’s Joke. This is a true story.

I do lay the ‘blame’ for this post squarely two members of my #SQLFamily: first on the heels of Grant Fritchey and his post by he same name. He in turn lays blame on Jen McCown’s post by the same name.

I mention elsewhere in my blog I prefer to be intelligiently lazy, so rather than retype, I’ll post the content from a Quora answer I wrote.  Technically I was just a consultant, and after twice getting a late check I made it clear to them that if they stopped paying me on time, I would stop working.  Apparently they liked me enough that a quick call to the CFO would get me a check cut that day.

So with that:

Let me give you an example of a client I once had. When I started with them, people loved working there and they were expanding and successful. So successful the company got bought.

Then… things changed.

Sales people were finding their expense checks weren’t getting paid (more on that later). Did you know, even if you try to explain to the credit card company that it’s a “company card” if it’s in your name and the company doesn’t pay it, you’ll ruin your credit score? Yes, it’s pretty difficult to be a sales person who can’t travel because no one will give you a credit card any more!

Then, to cut costs, an office move was proposed. Quite frankly, had I not been involved as their IT guy, it would have been a disaster for a variety of reasons. Fortunately for them, besides my IT skills, I could read blueprints. It was quite obvious to me that 2 outlets would not serve an office of 20–25 people with computers and printers. It took me nearly kidnapping the CFO on a day he visited and dragging him to the office to make clear how much more work the office needed. They simply assumed, “oh, it’ll have enough power.”

Meanwhile the previous owner had started a new company (in a completely different industry) and was growing and expanding at a furious rate. Also, my wife was a recruiter at another local company (in a different industry also). The only thing all three of these companies had in common was they all were software related, but the fields they served were completely different.

At one point, the top sales person from the failing company left to go get a job a with the new company. Within days the former company sent a cease and desist letter to the new company insisting they stop poaching employees and if they continued, they’d sue the owner for violating the non-compete clause. Now, keep in mind the owner was very much NOT approaching employees of the old company, but even if he were, the non-compete only applied if he had founded a new company in the same industry. he hadn’t. We had a good laugh at the old company.

Now, meanwhile, my wife, while not exactly poaching, knew that almost any offer she made would be accepted since morale was so bad at the old company.

Then… this happened. I was there for the meeting and sat in on it. It’s the closest I’ve come to “beatings will continue until morale improves” ever.

The CFO and CEO came into town for an all-hands meeting. Their goal was to address, among other things, the late employee expense checks issue.

I will say, they had some pretty looking slides. The slides showed things like cash-flow, moving towards profitability and some other items. But the message was quite clear, “We will continue to pay YOUR expense checks as late as possible because it helps our cash flow. And you should be grateful for this.” They very much could NOT understand why employees were furious that their expenses were basically being used as no-interest loans by the company. The rate of exits accelerated after that.

What had been a thriving company became a dying, decaying shell of a company in under a year because of the management.

One Postscript:

One of the developers who left the old company ended up at the new company. He submitted his expense check. He was reasonable, he knew it would probably hit his next pay cycle. He was OK with that. I still recall the look on his face when later that day someone from finance walked in with his expense check. They were under no obligation to turn it around that fast and he certainly wasn’t expecting it. But they did so. They “bought” his loyalty that day by a simple gesture.

So, if people are leaving, trying to force them to stay will backfire. Figure out what you’re doing wrong and fix it.

Nothing to Prove

Posted on by
Reply

This past weekend was a busy weekend for me. Thursday night I helped do the offensive door for my wife’s hockey team in the first game of a 3 game tournament. Despite only having 9 players (plus a goalie) they tied it 2-2 against a far larger squad. Quite impressive really seeing them up their level of play. They in fact got accused later of stacking the team with college students. Truth is, about half the team was in their 40s or above and the others late 20s or 30s. Not bad.

Friday night the family went to see Captain Marvel. I’ve mentioned before my daughter’s love of Star Wars. She’s also a fan of superheros, both in the comics and movies. We’ve seen a number of them together, including Wonder Woman and now Captain Marvel.

As a father I’m glad for movies like The Last Jedi, Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel. The last two might be called superhero movies, but they’re really about being a hero in general. You don’t need superpowers to be a hero. You need to be a person who decides to do the right thing at the right time. When Wonder Woman decides to cross the No-Man’s Land, she does rely on her superpowers to keep her safe, but she acts because she knows she has the power to make things better. Similarly, Carol Danvers is faced with a choice of doing what is easy and she has been taught to do and what is right. She’s a hero, again not because of her powers, but because she chooses to do the right thing.

Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel are great movies for a number of reasons; but I think foremost because they truly focus on their stars. Steve Trevor and Nick Fury are supporting partners, not just in theory, but in the way they often take their lead from the main characters. Both are strong and powerful people in their own right, but recognize they’re among their betters. And, aiding their partners doesn’t hurt their masculinity, and they realize that.

I enjoy these movies because, while, as far as I know, my daughter doesn’t have a magical lasso, nor can she shoot photon bursts out of her hands, she has role models. While yes, her favorite comic book superhero might be Batman, she really enjoys having these superheros as models.

On Saturday, she and I drove 2.5 hours to Binghamton NY for her team’s competition in something called “Odyssey of the Mind“. While her team didn’t do as well has hoped, it was still a great time to bond and talk, including about Captain Marvel and role models.

My wife had her second game of the tournament on Saturday and when she called to give me the score, I could pick up on her excitement even before she said they had lost, 1-0. But this time with only 8 players instead of 9, it was in some ways even more impressive than the Thursday game.

Sunday rolled around and since we had to take our son to the train station to go back to college, it was easier to bring him to the game first. So, he got to watch his mom’s team, again with only 8 players actually win, 3-1 and come in 3rd out of 6 teams!

It was a fitting cap to a weekend of watching powerful women.

Oh, and besides Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, and my wife’s hockey team be great role models for women, I think they’re great role models for men.  Men, you can have powerful women in your life and it doesn’t weaken you or make attack your masculinity.  If anything, it can help you be a better man.  So don’t just take your daughters to see Captain Marvel, take your sons.

 

Design Thoughts

Posted on by
1

Ever look at a product and wonder, “why did they design it that way?” I know I have, and I have some examples I want to bring up.

Years ago, over dinner, I had a programmer from our Wisconsin office basically ask, “why the hell is your file system for your web servers setup the way it is?”  It was a fair question. It wasn’t something one would normally see.  But before I explain that…

Like any modern American, I’m physically incapable of being more than 10′ from a flat screen TV in my house.  We have several, including one in my office and one in the kitchen. I couldn’t tell you the brand of the one in the kitchen (well I could, but I’m too lazy to go downstairs and find out) and the only reason I can tell you the brand of the one in my office is because I can see it from here. It’s an Inginsia brand.

Both serve the same function: they allow me to watch TV. But both have design quirks.

Their button layouts are a bit different (note the layout of the numbers and the volume/channel control buttons.)

Kitchen TV Remote

Kitchen TV Remote

Office TV Remote

Office TV Remote

The kitchen TV also has a built-in DVD player, so it has additional controls for that.

So obviously, there’s different design philosophies and requirements here. But I want to go a step deeper and talk a bit about functionality.

The kitchen TV remote, if you mistype a number, you can hit the Vol – button and it will essentially backspace and delete the number. Actually a handy feature.  The Office remote has no such functionality, though hitting EXIT will remove the entire channel already entered.  Score one for Dynex. (Ok, I did go downstairs so I could grab the remote and take a photo).

But, the Dynex has one annoying quirk I’ve never figured out. When I hit the OFF button, there’s a noticeable delay of 1-2 seconds before it actually turns off. For the life of me, I have NO idea why. I mean I’m turning off a TV. It’s not like I’m shutting down a computer where it has to write the contents of memory to disk and perform other tasks. Sure, maybe it has to save the last channel I was tuned to, but it could do that right after I tuned into that station. Same with the volume.  Every other TV in the house, including my office one, when you hit the off button, turns off instantly.

I’m reminded a bit of early computers that had the big red switch. There was something satisfying about turning off an early PC. You knew it was instantly off. There was no two questions about it. Now, shutting off a PC is a far more complex operation and can take sometime.  But a TV? I’d love to know why the kitchen TV takes a long time to turn off.

Now back to the file design the programmer was asking me about. Essentially we had 5-6 web front ends, each with a virtual directory in IIS pointing to a NAS. Not an entirely awful setup, but uncommon at the time.  We were offering a web platform to newspapers so they could publish their content. Originally we tried using a 3rd party package to make sure the content on all the servers was always in synch (since a newspaper could upload content at any time to any of the servers and wanted it available instantly). What we found was sometimes we’d get into race conditions where files could actually end up erasing themselves. The 3rd party company kept assuring us they had the solution. Well after a desperate call at 4:00 AM call from my on-duty NOC person, I drove into the office, scrambling to figure out a better solution. On the drive, the idea of using the virtual directories to the NAS occurred to me. We implemented it in about 30 minutes and solved our problems. It was supposed to be a temporary solution until we came up with a more robust, permanent solution. But, 18 months later it was still in place, working great and I was explaining it to our out of town programmer. He went from, “that’s nuts” to “Hey, that makes a lot of sense.”

So, I like to think that when there’s a design I don’t understand, the designers at the time had their reasons. But, to be honest, I’m not always sure.

For example, the photo that should be heading up this article, of a shampoo bottle and a bottle of conditioner, both from the same manufacturer, both designed to be cap down, are printed the opposite way. The only reason I can think of that makes sense is so that in a befuddled, sleep deprived state, I can more easily determine which is which. But even if that is the answer, why this way, and not the other? Inquiring minds want to know!

And yes, the shampoo bottle can be placed cap up, but the conditioner bottle can’t be. Again, why? The viscosity of the two aren’t that different. Again, inquiring minds want to know.

Shampoo/Conditioner bottles

One of these is upside down!