Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

This is stoopid.

We're all stoopid sometimes, but that's what this is. It's stoopid.

???

After a little more digging...

Seems I ran through the same steps in my head as the SO post the BBC includes, but the answer seemed obvious; this is the "worst case" I could think of going in...

The only reasonable workaround I can think of, short of fixing this bug in every damn version of ActionScript, is to test fields for "null" and escape them as CDATA values.

Well, duh. Though extend my sympathy for those who have a legacy system that still uses XML, not JSON. ;^)

What this really shows is...

There's waaaaaaay too much NIH syndrome in the enterprise

We're exceptionally bad at creating test cases

We need more imaginative coders.

If the name "Null" is still an issue three to six months from now, SHAME. No, ALL CAPS SHAME. FOR REAL. Horrible.

Wow. Seriously, I'm embarrassed for the profession. At worst, you needed to see why your client-side was "letting through" names that were empty so far that they got serialized to XML. Does nobody check the logs? Or are your logs so chatty you wouldn't see this error?

/facepalm

Richard Clarke interviewed with NPR, and seemingly everyone has seen the moneyball quote. It's worth reading, so I won't skip it, though my interest lies elsewhere...

CLARKE: No, David. If I were in the job now, I would have simply told the FBI to call Fort Meade, the headquarters of the National Security Agency, and NSA would have solved this problem for them. [The FBI is] not as interested in solving the problem as they are in getting a legal precedent.

So good. Now let's move on to the way he thinks. I really like to use this model. When someone oversimplifies a question, and tries to prevent something as a simple binary, as in, "Should Apple be forced to unlock an iPhone?", it's useful to show that we're ready on a spectrum or sliding scale between A and B. If you can put the question in a larger context, its faux simplicity falls away.

RICHARD CLARKE: ... Under the Obama administration, for example, we've said we're not going to torture people. You know, we could, at the far extreme to make the FBI's job easier, put ankle bracelets on everybody so that we'd know where everybody was all the time. That's a ridiculous example, but my point is encryption and privacy are larger issues than fighting terrorism.

GREENE: But can you just explain why you would compare, you know, a company helping the government design a way to unlock an iPhone to something extreme as torture and ankle bracelets? I mean, that sounds like a very extreme jump.

CLARKE: No, the point I'm trying to make is there are limits. And what this is is a case where the federal government, using a 1789 law, is trying to compel speech. And courts have ruled in the past, appropriately, that the government cannot compel speech. What the FBI and the Justice Department are trying to do is to make code writers at Apple - to make them write code that they do not want to write that will make their systems less secure. [emphasis mine]

Now we can discuss how "grey" unlocking the phone is. There's stuff that's not particularly controversial: Law enforcement should be able stop a masked man leaving a house through the window with a large bag to ask what's in there. Then there's stuff that's not confrontation in the opposite direction: We shouldn't make everyone wear GPS equipped ankle bracelets so that law enforcement can find anyone, any time, regardless of past history or probable cause.* Or that we shouldn't use extreme torture (let's face it, some of the "non-torture" means of interrogating are still, at least colloquially, torturous.)

It's a chart.

Crime likely?	Imposition Level
	Low	Med	High
High	Question masked man in window: YES	Search suspected masked man's home: Maybe	Torture burglar: NO
Low	Cameras at your bank: YES	Ability to GPS locate your phone: Maybe	Ankle bracelets for everyone!: NO

The iPhone unlocking is somewhere in the grid, somewhere between a burglar in a window and torturing the burglar, but where? And since the OS compromise could apply to anyone, doesn't this topic fall between bank cameras and ankle bracelets too? Which cells on the table are closest? Is there another axis we're missing (privacy)? Those are more interesting questions.

As I said, I love to reason like this. It's one of my favorite rhetorical tropes. I remember visiting a friend, and he thought that his milk had turned. His wife said, "But it's before the expiration date! It's fine." In the split second he took to reply, I butted in with, "Well, even if you keep a new carton closed and put it outside in the sun for a day, it's going to turn, regardless of date." Now we had two ends of the spectrum: Perfectly preserved milk good until the date, and poorly preserved milk that could conceivably turn before.

I wasn't trying to suggest anyone had treated the milk poorly, which is what the NPR interviewer tried to suggest to Clarke, I imagine to "BAM!" kick the interview "up a notch".

Hopefully that wasn't the interviewer's goal, but otherwise, Clarke is right back in the situation I often find myself, with someone who misses the rhetorical move and ends up annoyed that I dared suggest they don't know how to keep their milk cool. "Man, that's a very extreme jump!" No kidding. /le sigh

I get it if it's just a friend of mine who misses it, but an interviewer? Your one job was to listen, man. Okay, okay, that and keep the interviewee on track. Which he was doing exceptionally well by himself.

(Luckily both my friend & friend-in-law are excellent mathematicians, and immediately understood the logical grid I was setting out. ;^D)

* Though this one is probably less controversial than we think, at least if we carry around cellphones that are powered on.

Labels: government, iphone, privacy, rhetoric

// NOTE: I wanted to see how difficult this would be outside of creating a // view like I did for GetParameterSubscriptionMatrixesBySubscriptionId. I // think the lesson is that creating a view is smarter. // // "LINQ LEFT JOIN on Nullable<int>" // http://stackoverflow.com/a/28949184/1028230 // // Populating an entity from a custom join // http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5325797/ // // And, tangentially, Overriding Equals and GetHashCode for entity equality. // http://stackoverflow.com/a/508157/1028230

var query = from person in people join pet in pets on person equals pet.Owner into gj from subpet in gj.DefaultIfEmpty() select new { person.FirstName, PetName = (subpet == null ? String.Empty : subpet.Name) };

var query = from person in people left outer join pet in pets on person equals pet.Owner select new { person.FirstName, PetName = subpet.Name ?? string.Empty };

Heard Manton Reece, probably on the Timetable podcast, talk about how you, as a contractor, can never hit eight billable hours in a day. So that's obviously wrong, but you get his point, similar to when I talked about being suspicious of contractor hours. Eight hours working doesn't ever mean eight billable hours. There's always some overhead, like going off the clock to blog this.

What's recently occurred to me, though, was where in the day I most naturally put in long stretches of hours. As I've become a full-time indie contractor, I'm also doing more on what I'll euphemistically call "the domestic front". I usually end up running some "domestic" errand in the afternoon that ends with me, back at home, after running around town. And at that point, I don't usually start back up coding. I eat, catch up on email, read some stuff, maybe collect some gold & elixir ;^), and basically become household-man for the night.

When I worked full-time for someone, my domestic slate was clear-er. I knew that going in to contracting, because one of my goals with contracting was making sure I was precisely able to be more domestic. But when I worked for someone, I routinely had less on my plate, and more times to fall into Spolsky's Zone.

We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into "flow", also known as being "in the zone", where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration. This is when they get all of their productive work done. Writers, programmers, scientists, and even basketball players will tell you about being in the zone.

...

The other trouble is that it's so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers -- ESPECIALLY interruptions by coworkers -- all knock you out of the zone. If you take a 1 minute interruption by a coworker asking you a question, and this knocks out your concentration enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble. If you're in a noisy bullpen environment like the type that caffinated dotcoms love to create, with marketing guys screaming on the phone next to programmers, your productivity will plunge as knowledge workers get interrupted time after time and never get into the zone.

(Sidenote: That last point, of course, is why you want to hire programmers who naturally wear headphones when coding.)

The lost night

The domestic front is going great, but, long story less long, what I've noticed is that I don't work blocks of hours into the night as often now. I've recently regained one night a week without any serious commitments, and I'm working routinely that night until seven or eight. Every other day, I'm done at 4 or 5, with maybe some decompression hacking on my own stuff (because I'm too bushed to work confidently on anyone's billable projects) from 9-midnight.

I had no idea so many of my long blocks of work happened after traditional quitting time, but in retrospect, it makes perfect sense. My most productive time is after I've spun things up after lunch, gotten my questions answered, and entered that relaxed zone of increasingly quiet time at work after 5. Or, perhaps more realistically, 4:45. Anywhere I've worked, though, the calm after 6 or 7 is blissful.

Anyhow, I used to wonder why I wasn't getting in what felt like my normal hours, and then the obvious finally hit me, as I found myself in the shared office space after dark for the second or third week in a row. It's nighttime.

If I want to seriously bill, I need to get my nighttimes back. That's where my 8+ hours of daily productive, no-guilt, billable work time went. But that's also exactly what I'm trading to reduce domestic debt. I just don't think I realized how 1-to-1 the nighttime tradeoff to billable hours really was.

Labels: indie, productivity

There are three models of iPhone SE:

This is not Little Bobby Tables.

This is stoopid.

The lost night