“Blasts from the Past” is a collection of re-published articles dating from wa-a-a-y back to the time when I was publishing sf fanzines (1970s), through to some more recent articles published on (and about) the early days of the web (1990s).

I guess things haven’t really become much worse in the 16 years since I wrote this article. But on the other hand, they haven’t improved, either, either. Nanny is still going strong.

Yes, Nanny

(First published in September 1993)

I suppose it was inevitable.

Back in the bad old days, computer software was of the “hairy-chested” variety. If you couldn’t work out how to use it, that was just too damn bad.

Computer programs had to be started up with a series of cryptic and hard-to-remember options from the “command-line prompt”. Even if you could recognise that as the set of bizarre “C:>” characters that stood blinking at you imperiously from the top left of a black computer screen — why “C” ? – why a colon? – why a funny right angle bracket? — you still had to remember and to be able to type such impossibly awkward combinations as “split -fmyfile.zip -wmyfile.000 -s720″ in order to carry out perfectly ordinary functions.

If you used the Unix operating system, it was even worse. You had to know that “cat” meant “show me the contents of”, that “grep” meant “search for this bit of text”, that “ls” meant “show me the files on the hard disk”, and that “kermit” was neither the name of Theodore Roosevelt’s son nor the name of a little green frog on television, but a modem communications program.

But as the years went by, software gradually became more “user-friendly”. Commands became less cryptic, programs started to sport “menus”.

We reached the era of the “graphical user interface”, and of control using those weird Camembert-cheese-shaped objects now known fondly as “mice”. Once you mastered the non-trivial skill of learning to move something around on the desk in order to see a little arrow moving around in sympathy on the screen, you had joined the era of “point and click”. The only trouble was, there were suddenly an awful lot of things to point and click at, and pointing at the wrong thing at the wrong time could be as embarrassing as it would be in public.

Eventually, programs started to come with “Help” systems, even — good grief — “context sensitive” help systems, which gave us advice about just what we were trying to do at that moment. Software at last became easy to use, and if only things had stopped there, all would have been well.

But now we have reached the ultimate in helpful software, and in my humble opinion we have finally gone one step too far. Now we have reached the era of what I like to call “Nanny software”.

Nanny software knows what is for your own good, and is determined to let you know about it.

Nanny software asks you “Are you sure you want to delete that file, dear?”, and when you say “Yes,” asks “Now are you really sure? You can’t get it back afterwards, you know.”.

Nanny software says “Do you really want to copy that file over there?”, and you feel like screaming “Well, why else would I ask you to do it?!”.

The ultimate point has been reached, I think, with software like Microsoft Publisher 2.0, which contains the most bossy nanny I have yet encountered. Until you find out how to shut her up (a non-trivial undertaking), the MsPub nanny will keep on interrupting you whenever you try to do something with messages like “I see you’re trying to print out this document. Now, let me just show you how to do it better, dear.” or “You’ve been working on this document for a quarter of an hour, dear, and I think it’s about time you saved it.”.

The nanny in Microsoft Word 6.0 is just as bad. This one even insists on fixing your spelling for you as you type. “Now I know you typed ‘teh’, dear, but I’m sure you really meant to type ‘the’, so I’ve just changed it for you, wasn’t that nice of me?” Or it fixes the capitalisation for you, so that you can’t work out why you can’t type names like ‘McDonald’ because Nanny keeps changing it back to ‘Mcdonald’. After all she knows, even if you don’t, that you can’t have a capital in the middle of a word, now can you?

It seems that the future holds even more of this kind of thing. People are talking about developing intelligent “agents” which do such stuff as tidying up your computer desktop for you by putting files in folders where it thinks you would like them to go. You know what the result will be, of course. It’s like when the cleaning lady clears up your real desktop. You can’t find a damn thing for weeks.

Already we have “scheduler” software which interrupts you in the middle of a perfectly entertaining computer game to remind you about something. “Don’t forget to write that article for The Age”, or “You’re supposed to be on your way to Aunt Mabel’s” or “You’ll be late for your doctor’s appointment if you don’t hurry up”.

And then there’s grammar-checking software! It’s bad enough to have spelling checkers telling us that there is no such word as “gafia” and that there are two ‘p’s in “applicable”, but now we have software to nag us about the passive and active voice, and to tell us not to make our sentences too long, like this one, because long sentences are too difficult to understand.

I tell you, things have gone too far, and it won’t be too long before we have software which tells us we ought to send a thank-you note to Aunt Jane for the lovely pair of thick socks she sent us for Christmas, or which nags us to sign up for that aerobics program to get our weight down instead of spending so much time in front of the computer screen.

Just one step further, and we’ll have robots which make us chicken soup and tuck us up in bed at the first sign of a sniffle. Shades of Jack Williamson’s horrifying story With Folded Hands.

In fact, I’m starting to realise what the word “personal” means in “personal computer”. It means “damned impudent” as in “if I may ask a personal question…”.

It’s true that I don’t want to go back to the days of “hairy-chested” computing, but I do think that we have to re-assert our dignity a little bit and get rid of software which pampers us to the point of irritation. In other words, it’s time we left the nursery for good, gave Nanny the sack and let her perambulate away into the sunset, never to be seen again.

“Blasts from the Past” is a collection of re-published articles dating from wa-a-a-y back to the time when I was publishing sf fanzines (1970s), through to some more recent articles published on (and about) the early days of the web (1990s).

I hope that things have changed a little in programming circles since I wrote this 13 years ago, particularly with regard to the gender balance… but I’m not so sure!

This Rough Magic

(First published in July 1996)

From time to time as part of training for my job I attend computer programming seminars of various kinds. The most important is the annual Microsoft Tech Ed conference.

Now, whenever I go to one of these events, it immediately strikes me what a heterogenous collection of people are in attendance.

With no exaggeration at all, the audience is always 95% to 99% male. At least 30% of the attendees have beards and are bespectacled. Well over 75% are wearing jumpers, cardigans or short sleeves (depending on the weather), and look as though wearing a suit or even a tie would be absolute anathema to them. By far the majority have a distant, dreamy look.

What is very depressing to me is that I fit this stereotype perfectly.

But I’m also very puzzled. Certainly when I did my graduate diploma in computing, the students did not fit this stereotype; indeed the gender balance was almost equal, and the dress sense of both men and women was far more formal.

It seems there’s a great difference between the students of computer science and those who end up as practictioners of programming and the more technical side of things.

As I looked over the audience at the last such conference, it slowly began to dawn on me that there was a strange and compelling similarity between this group of people and that of another such group as described in history and legends.

Computer programmers are, in fact, wizards.

Think about it.

A group of almost entirely male. usually bearded, practioners of art which is highly arcane to the general public. A group of unworldly men absorbed in their books and their learning. Men who spend most of their days staring into a glowing crystal screen, muttering and cursing at it.

These people treasure special methods of doing things written in obscure languages. These methods may have been inherited from others, or found in special texts, or may have been worked out painstakingly by themselves by trial and error. Certainly they treasure their private libraries of methods and tools which they can use to alter the way things work. What is an algorithm if not a spell? What is a spell, if not an algorithm written in a difficult to understand language?

In the world of the computer, these people have real power to affect reality, and to conjure up things that were not there before.

There are some who have sold their souls to evil, and who create spells/programs which attack and destroy the work of others. Others, more pure-minded, who have dedicated themselves to the common good.

Looked at in this light, it is no wonder that there are so few women among this group. Wizards, both in Terry Pratchett’s books and in real legend, are an exclusively masculine lot. Witches operate in a different mode and gather in different groups. Not for them the lure of obscure knowledge and power, more the practical application of skills to everyday life.

For the wizard, often the more esoteric the knowledge, the more difficult the language, the more obscure the task, the better. How else to explain the popularity of cryptic programming languages such as C++ and Lisp?

The obsession that these people have is a strange one. It is certainly the lure of power, enormous power, within a particular sphere. It is the power of creation and destruction; of life and death, if you like. But the world in which this power is wielded is not the real world. It is the universe of cyberspace.

For all the increasing dominance of computers in our workplaces and our everyday lives, it is hard to imagine that these dreamy, bearded souls who are wizards or programmers depending on how you look at it, are ever likely to control the world.

Shakespeare, as always, knew the truth of it when he has his wizard-Duke, Prospero, recall wistfully:

The government I cast upon my brother,
And to my state grew stranger, being transported,
And rapt in secret studies.

– The Tempest, Act I Scene II

When it comes to preserving your valuable data, it pays to be paranoid.

Assume the worst, think of all the possible ways things could go wrong. Be paranoid. The question is not whether you are paranoid, but whether you are paranoid enough.

These days, everyone has valuable data, and it’s taking up more and more room. Documents, spreadsheets and databases; emails, photographs and even video. Game players have many save files capturing their progress in various games. In my case and that of most programmers I also have many files and folders comprising highly valuable program source code. We’re all working hard generating digital files of one form or another, almost every day.

So, think about how you would feel if you lost that data. Bad? It could be worse than bad.

About ten years ago the young programmers in my office were having fun replaying an audio file garnered off the Internet, from some computer company’s help-line. It was a call from some guy who had been writing a book on his computer, maybe a novel. Something went wrong with the machine and he sent it in for repair. The computer company had (for whatever reason) wiped the hard disk. The young guys in my office thought it was hugely amusing to hear this guy raging in despair about the loss of all of his data, almost literally foaming at the mouth. Personally, I found it very painful to listen to. I could feel his pain.

Losing data, particularly creative work you have labored over, is tragic. This is why I am paranoid about backups.

Here are my paranoid rules:

• If there’s only one copy of something, it might as well not exist at all, you’re going to lose it. Make an immediate copy of any irreplaceable item (such as photographs of a wedding, which can’t be replaced at all).
   
• If you only have two copies of something, each copy must be kept in a different physical location. The house or office could burn down (or, as happened to my daughter and her husband, the backup drive can be stolen along with the laptop it was backing up).
   
• Two copies is not enough. Your hard drive could crash AND the backup copy could be lost or prove corrupt. I’ve had it happen.
   
• How do you know your backup files aren’t corrupt? Check them regularly.
   
• Are you backing up everything you might want? I regularly (say once very 18 months) reformat my desktop computer. That’s when I remember all the things I should have backed up but could easily forget to: fonts, passwords, email archives, application settings.
   
• What about backups of material not on your desktop computer? Like on-line blogs, forum posts, etc. A colleague of mine forgot to renew his domain name and hosting package and lost a valuable travel blog and photographs.
   
• Think about how much time you would be prepared to put in to re-create your work if it was lost. In other words, how much work could you bear to lose? A day’s worth? A week’s worth? Backup more often than that.
   
• There’s no such thing as too many copies if the data is really valuable.

So here’s my backup strategy. Personally, I don’t yet think it’s paranoid enough.

• For program source code, I use a version control system (Subversion) to save progressive versions, each time I do significant work on any programming project. The commit happens via a VPN, to a server in a different physical location to my desktop – in fact, to an office some 20 km away. This generally happens once or twice a day on a current project. As Jeff Attwood says, source control is the absolute bedrock of software engineering.
   
• I have an external network drive (a 500GB LaCie Ethernet Mini). I use Acronis to schedule weekly backups of ‘My Documents’ and source code folders, on an incremental basis (this means I can backtrack, à la Mac Time Machine, to previous versions of things).
   
• I copy the Acronis backup files from the LaCie to one of two identical external USB drives (Western Digital MyBooks). Only one of these is kept at my house. On an approximately weekly basis, I take the current MyBook drive with me to another physical location, and swap it with the identical drive already there. Even in my house, the MyBook drive doesn’t live on my desk, but somewhere else in the house where a thief won’t find it.
   
• When I’m feeling particularly vulnerable, I burn DVD-ROMs of really critical files and keep them somewhere else.

You might quite reasonably ask why I don’t use ‘cloud storage’ to backup files to a location on the Internet, like Amazon’s S3. The answer is that in Australia our broadband upload speeds are still so feeble that it would take weeks to backup any significant volume of data this way.

So am I paranoid enough? I guess I’ll only find out when things go wrong.

“Even paranoids have enemies”
— Golda Meir to Henry Kissinger

“Blasts from the Past” is a collection of re-published articles dating from wa-a-a-y back to the time when I was publishing sf fanzines (1970s), through to some more recent articles published on (and about) the early days of the web (1990s).

Why I Hate Computers

(First published in July 1995)

 
My feelings towards computers must, I imagine, be like those of an Arabian camel driver towards his camels.

They are essential to his business, indeed they are his business. On good days, he may admit to a sneaking fondness for them. But most of the time he has to put enormous effort into getting them up and running and doing what they are supposed to. And on bad days – which seem to be most days – they spit in his eye or kick him up the backside.

The Multimedia Camel - that's the pretty black camel with the jewelled humps and four left feet.

And on really bad days, when he is desperately trying to get a valuable caravan full of dates between Kuwait and Riyadh before they spoil, they get lost and take him on an unguided tour of an Iraqi minefield.

Ten years ago, if you had asked me why I hated computers, I would have said that I hated them because they always did exactly what I told them to. Not what I meant them to. Only what I told them to. And they would do it every time. The analogy back then would not have been with camels, but with a dumb but keen mongrel dog who treated your morning newspaper the way she treated the sticks you threw for her down at the park – sure, she fetched it, but you didn’t tell her not to chew it, now did you? But at least you knew that she’d chew it every time.

In the last ten years, we have had incredible progress in computers and computing power. Only it didn’t quite go the way we expected it to. We thought we were developing artificial intelligence. Instead what we got was – artificial stupidity.

Computers and their operating systems have now become so complex that they are no longer the least bit predictable. Now they are like camels. One day, you hit your lead camel with a stick and he’ll get up and start moving. The next day, he might bite you on the knee instead.

It’s like that with modern computers: now they have attitude. Things are never exactly the same two days running. One day they’ll work perfectly, next you find that some perfectly innocuous program you’ve used a hundred times before has decided to bite back and refuse to work.

There’ll be a reason for it of course – computers are not subject to random whims. But finding out why may be beyond the wit of humans. There’s probably a reason the camel bit you on the knee, too, but what are your chances of finding out?

But camels, compared to computers, at least have a saving grace: they don’t talk back.

They may spit disgusting stuff at you and defecate on your foot, but at least they don’t say with bland and infuriating calmness: “Sorry, a system error has occurred” and show you a pretty picture of a time-bomb while spilling your dates all over the sand dune.

We are moving now, it seems, towards computers that can be controlled by voice. Indeed, Microsoft will sell you a sound system that comes with a neat microphone that clips to the top of your computer monitor. The trouble is, they don’t explain what will happen when you come out with the most common phrase I hear people yelling at their computers, the infuriated, baffled: “What!?!”.

I suspect the computer will just smirk at you with that sloppy, supercilious sneer that camels have and head off at high speed into the desert carrying away all your precious data, never to be seen again.