Linkstew

First up, I read this article about the Windows build process. As I read it, I was a good combination of horrified and fascinated. I can't even begin to comprehend the complexity involved in that thing... Five thousand programmers? That's almost as many residents as live in the UC Berkeley dorms, and I can't imagine all of them being organized towards one common goal, with the possibility that something someone does will impact someone else's system in some unpredictable way...

And yes, I was horrified by both the complexity being described, and horrified that I was fascinated by what I was reading. Proof once again that I am a geek.

As I read the article, I imagined that the programmers at the lowest levels didn't even know what they were working on -- that they were given a specification for a subroutine, and were just asked to make it do something based on the input. This image was fueled by Stephenson's description of Y.T.'s mom's job with the Feds in Snow Crash, where the programmers are "interchangeable parts" turning out tiny widgets, and the actual software engineering is done by people who aren't actually programming.

The quote that most caught my eye from the article was about the significance of a broken build, which boggled my mind almost as much as the complexity involved in the first place. And I

"We've sent out calls at 3 a.m. when the build is broken, find the developer that broke it, and get him into work right then and fix it immediately. The developers are on call 24 hours a day. There's definitely an escalation process. A broken build is considered a critical, severity-1 problem."

It also got me wondering how Mac OS X and Apple compares. Maybe I'll find out some day.

Second, this interview with Marc Andreessen (one of the co-founders of Netscape) was kind of short, but he did say one thing that I found very thought provoking:

"Things like the back and forward button, we never intended that to be a permanent part of the interface. But people get locked into metaphors. You have to be careful with the metaphors you put in front of people because once they click onto one, that's it.

Consider how pervasive the back and forward button have become these days -- to the point of being "basic" features of our file system browsers -- and you'll see how significant it really is.

So at the end of the last new Buffy episode -- the one where Dawn thinks she's a potential slayer for awhile -- Xander and Dawn have a heartwarming little talk about how you can still be important without having any superpowers. Xander talked for awhile how he'd been helping Buffy for 7 years, and at the end Dawn said "Maybe that's your power... Seeing, Knowing."

And I sat up straight and were anyone else in the room, I would have commented on Xander's stint as a bartender back in season 4. But since I didn't have anyone to talk to, I wrote down this sentence on my laptop instead: "Xander was a bartender, and bartenders are romanticized as seers and knowers! Xander's stint as a bartender was a metaphor for his role in the group!"

Which, rereading the script for Beer Bad is pretty obvious, but that sort of thing is one of the reasons I like the show: various themes continually reoccur in different ways throughout the show, and sometimes subtle references to other episodes happen all the time.

And, woohoo, new Buffy tonight. Pity I already accidentally saw a preview, which spoiled the surprise for me.

I was distracted in class all day today. I just couldn't focus on what the professors were saying.

You know how when there are a few girls floating around that you have crushes on and you've got a feeling that something might happen soon, but you can't be sure? Despite all the anticipation, in the end it comes down to the fact that girls can often be fickle. In the end, all you can do is wait until something clicks.

And you know how at some point, something does click? Maybe it's a look in her eye, maybe it's a new name she's started calling you, or maybe it's just availability... But at that point, you know that something is going to happen, and the only question left is when. There's no more uncertainty, and instead there's just a controlled exchange leading up the inevitable.

Well, this morning I checked my computer and found out that something with one of those girls finally "clicked."

After receiving that kind of news, it was understandably hard for me to pay attention in class today. I spent all day looking at her picture on my laptop. I thought about how she'd keep me warm in bed on cold winter nights (Well, once California figures out that it's November and not August). I whispered my good news to a friend in class, laughing quietly when I described her as a "Gigahertz witha Gigaram." And I wondered if she would ever be able to love me as much as I know I'm going to love her.

So the only real question left is when, and according to Apple, my new PowerBook G4 and I will be hooking up in 5-7 days.

Inspiration struck me tonight, and realized why I blog: I'm backing myself up.

Now stick with me for a moment while I explain this, because there were a number of steps involved in my reaching this conclusion.

When I find myself explaining the difference between "RAM" and "hard disk storage" to someone who doesn't really know computers, I always end up using the metaphor Computer Memory is Human Memory to help him understand things.

"RAM is like a person's short term working memory he uses when he's actively thinking about something," I tell him. "RAM is that 7+-2 you hear so much about. RAM is where your computer keeps what you're typing until you save the changes, just like short term memory is where your brain keeps what you're thinking about until you make the effort to 'commit it to memory.'"

"Hard disk storage, on the other hand, is like where your brain keeps your memory of your first kiss," I continue. "You have access to it when you want it, and the rest of the time it just sits in your brain until you need it. When you hit 'save,' the hard disk is the memory to which what you typed is committed."

"A person can only think about a few things at once with his short term memory, but by buying more RAM, your computer can think about more things at once. And a person can remember a lot more than he can think about, and by buying a bigger hard disk, your computer can remember a lot more." I explain.

But in Microserfs, a comment is made that "We've reached a critical mass point where the amount of memory we have externalized in books and databases (to name but a few sources) now exceeds the amount of memory contained within our collective biological bodies," and that statement stopped me in my tracks.

In a flash of insight, I turned the metaphor Computer Memory is Human Memory around, switched Human Memory to Human Knowledge, and ended up with Human Knowledge is Computer Memory.

Looking at it from that direction, I realized how amazingly volatile and short term all of human memory really is. We don't "save" things to our "long term" memory. Long term memory happens to be a little less volatile than working memory, but both of them will be lost if we crash.

I realized that if I don't externalize myself, then when I "shut down," my unsaved changes will be lost. I blog in order to save me. I'm backing myself up so that once I'm turned off, my data will still live on.

Through the looking glass of Human Knowledge is Computer Memory, my short term memory becomes registers for my CPU, and maybe a little cache, while my "long term" memory is just my main memory. It's all volatile, though. My blog is my hard disk.

And sprinkling in a little Douglas Adams for good measure, the human species becomes a massively parallel processing computer. Every human experience provides our internal computers with more data that, in combination with data each one of us has acquired by accessing stored human knowledge, produces more data that can be added to the human experience.

But to be part of the human experience, that information has to be saved, by blogging (or other means). Catalogued and indexed in computers, human experience is preserved and available for future generations to build upon, eventually synthesizing the question whose answer is 42.

That last paragraph is awfully human centric, but it's humans who save their changes for later humans to synthesize into still more complex ideas. Like this one.

So in the fall, I'm thinking about taking Philosophy of Language with John Searle (TTh 2-330), followed immediately by Metaphor with George Lakoff (TTh 330-5). For those of you who aren't in the know, Searle and Lakoff are both hugely egotistical. And while each of them has bigger fish to fry, their paths intersect often enough for there to be some irony in taking that pair of classes. Basically, I think this might be simultaneously one of the worst and best ideas I've ever had. Here's a couple of random comments that people have shared with me on the prospect:

"It would be like escaping the pull of one black hole, only because you were sucked in by another one."
-- Alert, on the prospect of Searle followed immediately by Lakoff.

"It would be like a binary ego system. They don't want anything to do with each other, and yet no matter how hard they try, they can't get away from each other."
-- Pi.

I'm not actually sure if I'll actually end up taking Searle, but I'm definitely taking Lakoff. Mmm, Metonymy.