Computing Blog

A blog about all aspects of computing and technology from software development to social network to commentary on the IT industry as a whole.

The Internet Is Broken

Posted on November 6, 2015 by Tim Hall

Are you sick of provocative clickbait articles across the web that read like something deep into Poe’s Law territory? Ben Collins of The Daily Beast is sick of it too. This is his response to a particularly ridiculous piece of above-the-line trolling that’s generated far too much monetised outrage.

As you know, this is a stupid thought only an intentionally provocative person would think, and the Internet let the author (whose name we’re also not printing, because we’re not rewarding this kind of thing) know exactly that. At some level, you’ve got to admire the guts: this guy had to have known that no person with real problems on this Earth shared this thought, and yet he spent hours of his human life writing about it before disseminating it on a big media platform with his face next to it.

But it’s still profoundly stupid. And he knows it. And he printed it anyway.

It’s not his fault, though.

If you think you’ve seen more of these recently—stories with no grounding in reality that 99 percent of the planet would never agree with and exist solely to get you to click and see if you’re not having a very swift stroke—well, you have. If you think standards for what is an acceptable story in respected news publications on the web have gotten lower in a chase for clicks, you’re right.

I don’t think this stuff is merely irritating but essentially harmless. The worst examples deepen the internet’s cultural and political divides, making the online world a more polarised and nastier place. We’re seeing people egg-manning this stuff, loudly declaring that their chosen outgroup believes some outrageous thing, and this is why we must all hate them.

Just like the ever more intrusive nature of web advertising, it’s a race to the bottom which will ultimately eat itself. Sadly even once-respected publications are being dragged down this route.

Ben Collins has suggested websites change their advertising model to encourage engagement rather than maximising clicks. Whether he’s right or not, the current situation is not sustainable.

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Noel Gallagher, The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Posted on November 6, 2015 by Tim Hall

So Noel Gallagher has a new interview out. His interviews are always far more entertaining than his records nowadays, and this one sees him try and pick a fight with One Direction fandom, amongst others.

But this quote takes the biscuit (I’ve left the swears in)

I was being asked about a reunion five weeks after I left the band. It’s a modern phenomenon. It’s a modern disease. All the bands that get back together, all those ones you’ve mentioned [Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin] they didn’t have anybody in the line-up as fucking brilliant as me. What’s the guitarist out of Fleetwood Mac called? Lindsay Buckingham. I can’t remember him setting the world on fire. Jimmy Page? That’s debatable. He’s a good guitarist but I’m not sure how many solo albums he’s fucking made.

Oh dear, oh dear.

The software development industry, or rather the software development recruitment industry, often talks about “Rock star developers”. I have always found the concept utterly ridiculous, and the above quote goes a long way towards demonstratng why. In today’s world, the concept of “Rock Star” is far more about swaggering ego than it is about actual skill.

As a guitar player, Noel Gallagher is at best a mediocre talent who is not fit to tie the shoelaces of Jimmy Page or Lindsay Buckingham. If you read some listicle of supposedly great guitarists and see his name there, it’s as much proof that the list is a load of cobblers as the absence of Tony Iommi or Nile Rogers. And as a songwriter his work is so derivative and backward-looking that if he was a programmer he’s be writing in COBOL.

There was a day when “Rock Stars” represented the top talent of their profession. The larger-than-life personality was part of the package, but the talent had to be there. But the days of Freddy Mercury and Jimi Hendrix had long gone by the time Oasis arrived on the scene, and the worlds of creative artists and media celebrities have gone their seperate ways.

Anyone who talks about “Rock star programmers” is living in the 1970s.

Posted in Music Opinion, Testing & Software | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Web Advertising is Eating Itself

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Tim Hall

How often does this happen?

  • You click on a link that appears in one of your social media feeds.
  • You begin reading the article
  • Suddenly the screen darkens and and an unskippable video ad pops up, often with audio.
  • You close the browser tab without reading the rest of the article.

The web did not used to be like this. There used to be a time when not every online newspaper article had “sponsored links” to bottom-feeding clickbait garbage about celebrities who have aged badly or the sorts of barely-legal get-rich-quick scams that you only used to see in email spam.

It’s a classic tragedy of the commons situation. Now that internet usage in the developed world has plateaued, web advertisers are locked into a zero-sum game with each other for finite amount of web users’ attention. Making your own advertising more and more intrusive gains a temporary advantage, but it only leads to a race to the bottom in which everyone else is the loser.

It’s also the reason why a thousand-word article sometimes results in a browser-crashing multi-megabyte web page, bloated with third-party cruft whose only purpose is to serve ads that the reader doesn’t actually want.

The whole ecosystem is clearly unsustainable, and the way more and more people are being forced to install ad-blockers just to make the web usable highlights this. There has to be a better way.

So, once web advertising has finally eaten itself, what alternative economic models might replace it?

Posted in Testing & Software | 3 Comments

The Wootton Bassett near-miss

Posted on October 21, 2015 by Tim Hall

Battle of Britain Pacifit "Tangmere"(Wikimedia Commons)

The official report into the near-miss at Wootton Bassett (pdf) makes interesting reading, and demonstrates what I’ve often said about rail and air accident reports making useful reading for software testers.

In this case there were no injuries or indeed any damage to the train, although it could have been a very major accident; a collision at high speed with one train formed of 1950s-design rolling stock that doesn’t have the crashworthiness of modern trains.

The immediate cause of the incident was blatant disregard of rules and procedures which rightly raised questions about the levels of training and safety culture, so it wasn’t really a surprise that the operator’s licence was suspended.

Aside from the chain of events that led to the train overrunning a red signal, what makes it a worthwhile read is the details of how modern automated safety systems interface with literal steam-age techology in the shape of a 70-year old steam locomotive. It also highlights some user interface issues with the controls within the locomotive cab.

Posted in Testing & Software, Travel & Transport | Tagged | Comments Off

The world would be a far better place if we were all more willing to unfollow those who unthinkingly reshare every viral outrage of the day on social media, but never bother to post corrections when the stories they’ve been signal-boosting turn out to be completely bogus. One major SF author and a well-known game designer are currently on Yellow Cards over this….

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Tim Hall | 2 Comments

Peeple: App or Poe?

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Tim Hall

PeepleEveryone you know will be able to rate you on the terrifying ‘Yelp for people’ — whether you want them to or not, which up this horrifying app. Twitter is melting down again with outrage, such that the founders of Peeple ironically ended up protecting their Twitter account at one point.

This makes me wonder if Poes Law now applies not just to extremist ideologues, but to social media applications as well. It’s actually very difficult to tell if Peeple is a real but dangerously ill-conceieved application waiting to be launched, or if the whole thing is a very clever hoax, perhaps viral marketing for something quite different.

Fortunately, if it is real, its core functionality appears to violate UK and EU data protection and privacy laws, so there’s no way an applicaiton which can so obviously be used as a bullying platform could legally launch here in Britain.

Also, if it’s real, it raises the question of tester ethics again. As a responsible ethical tester, can you fail and entire application as not fit for purpose and potentially dangerous at a fundamental business requirement level?

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The Volkswagen emissions scandal

Posted on September 30, 2015 by Tim Hall

Great blog post by James Christie on the implications of the Volkswagen emissions scandal for the software testing profession.

What interests me about this is that the defeat device is integral to the control system (ECM); the switch has to operate as part of the normal running of the car. The software is constantly checking the car’s behaviour to establish whether it is taking part in a federal emissions test or just running about normally. The testing of this switch would therefore have been part of the testing of the ECM. There’s no question of some separate piece of kit or software over-riding the ECM.

This means the software testers were presumably complicit in the conspiracy. If they were not complicit then that would mean that they were unaware of the existence of the different dyno and road calibrations of the ECM. They would have been so isolated from the development and the functionality of the ECM that they couldn’t have been performing any responsible, professional testing at all.

I’ve always maintained that a good tester needs to be able to speak truth to power, and any tester who simply says whatever the project manager wants to hear is not a worthwhile tester. But Christie follows that to its obvious conclusion, and raises some very important questions on the testing profession’s moral and ethical responsibilities. This is something the testing community doesn’t talk enough about.

Posted in Testing & Software | Tagged | 2 Comments

Why tank stories make great tech myths

Posted on September 30, 2015 by Tim Hall

Interesting guest post on Charlie Stross’ blog by M. Harold Page “Why tank stories make great tech myths“, comparing the history of tank warfare with software development.

However, you’re a sophisticated lot, so call the above “A word from our sponsor” and let me tell you why I think tank stories make great tech myths.

First some examples…

We all know the one about the Panther and the T34. The Panther is the better tank, when the Russian mud hasn’t knocked it out, when it doesn’t need shipping to Czechoslovakia for repair, when it’s not being spammed by cheap and cheerful T34s.

That’s a story that ought to be taught to engineers and software developers. Sometimes perfect means “delivered now”. It’s reputedly the Duke Nukem Forever story, but that’s just the most anecdotal example of chasing perfection at the expense of practicality. I’m sure you guys have others.

He doesn’t develop the metaphor quite as much as I’d have liked, preferring to talk about actual tanks. But it’s still an interesting read,

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The news that the VW scandal caused nearly 1m tonnes of extra pollution raises some serious ethical issues for the software industry. It’s hard to imagine that people coded and tested this functionality without understanding what they were doing was illegal.

Posted on September 23, 2015 by Tim Hall | 3 Comments

The Pros and Cons of Twitter Blocklists

Posted on August 12, 2015 by Tim Hall

Slate’s David Auerbach has written a well-balanced piece in Slate on the pros and cons of Twitter blocklists. He recognises that they’re a valuable weapon against harassers and trolls, but can cause their own problems, and that people and especially organisations should be wary of using third-party blocklists without understanding the agenda of whoever is maintaining the list.

For example, Arthur Chu has a shared blocklist of 30,000 people. All you need to do to get on that list is having ever disagreed with or criticised Arthur Chu. The fact that I’m on it ought to tell you all you need to know. Other blocklists will include you merely for following the wrong accounts.

Blocklists are at best a sticking plaster for a problem Twitter itself should have been more pro-active at dealing with a long time ago.

What’s very telling, though, is the level of vitriol I’ve seen directed at the the author of the piece, with some high-profile figures not even bothering to critique the piece itself but going straight to ad-hominem, accusing him of being pro-harassment (he’s not) or being a supporter of Gamergate (which he isn’t). Somebody’s even threatened to build a new blocklist threatening his followers (i.e. unfollow him or you’ll get blocked).

It does sound as though he’s struck a raw nerve.

Posted in Social Media | Tagged , | 1 Comment