Very early in my career as a programmer, someone gave me advice that I needed to aim for the “ninety percent solution”, in other words, don’t waste time trying to get the perfect 100% solution. Tom Cargill of Bell Labs provided a concise explanation: “The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.” This is analogous to the problem of distilling ethanol, getting it 97% pure isn’t too hard to do, but going beyond that takes enormous amounts of energy, and normally isn’t worth it (that is based on fuzzy memories of college chemistry class, so forgive any technical inaccuracies).
Recently I have read a number of articles which remind me that veganism can fall prey to this 90% rule. There are a number of reasons why one may become vegan: health, environment, animal welfare and animal rights (I exclude the “imitating a celebrity” reasons that PETA works towards, as that’s never a good reason for doing anything). The problem is that all but one of those reasons can only get you to 90%.
When I first became vegan it was for health reasons. So when a friend of mine told me that “a little steak now and then won’t kill you,” I had no good answer to this. He was right. I could eat a steak right now, and the impact on my long term health would be negligible. In other words, there was little difference between being 100% or 90% vegan, when looking at the health arguments. See How the Health Argument Fails Veganism for more about this.
Being vegan for environmental reasons suffers the same problem, as the mis-titled article Veggieworld: Why eating greens won’t save the Planet shows. If your concern is the environment, being 90% vegan is a pretty clear win. But arguing for that last 10% can be very hard. So “a little steak now and then won’t kill the planet.”
As the recent decades have shown us, the animal welfare arguments also suffer from this problem. Someone who is vegan because of how animals are treated, when presented with the flesh of an animal who was free-range, fed organic feed, and was gently asphyxiated with a gold-lined silk scarf at the moment of orgasm, they would have a hard time refusing. Thus we see the parade of now-ex-vegans marching into Whole Foods to buy their “happy meat” with a clear conscience. Or so they think.
So, finally we arrive at the animal rights position. Gary Francione presents the clearest, most consistent and most concise presentation of this position: “We have no moral justification for using nonhumans for our purposes.” Here we have the 100% solution we’ve been looking for. This is where we all need to start when we tell people why we are vegan. And why they should be vegan. And why you should be vegan.
I just read the article Why I Hate Telling People I’m Vegan, and I can partially understand the frustration with the barage of questions (often silly) and nutritional misconceptions. Go play some bingo to get a sampling. When I first became vegan, I often wouldn’t have clear answers in these situations and dreaded them. Over the years I’ve read enough that I can now address many of these questions.
However, there is a passage in this article which begs the question “why are you vegan?”
Raise the beef, cut it up… sell it. Fine by me. I have no problem with what you’re doing, I simply choose not to partake.
I might have said the same thing years ago, largely because I became vegan, initially, for health reasons, which makes such a decision a personal one. Thankfully within a few years I heard an interview with Gary Francione, which provided a simple and compelling reason for being vegan.
So if I were in the same situation as the author of the above passage, my thought process would go like this: “I can’t stop you from raising the cow, killing it, cutting it up and selling it. I consider this immoral behavior, and I have a big problem with it.” But saying that out loud won’t gain any friends, let alone converts, so such situations must be handled with delicacy.
But the more interesting passage was amongst the comments, by the same author:
I mean, can you imagine if meat-eaters evangelized about their diets? Vegans would have an absolute fit - sprouts and farrow flying willy-nilly out of their re-usable Whole Foods bags! Yipes!
Setting aside the dismissive, stereotyping imagery, the fact is that meat-eaters are evangelizing all the time. We are bombarded by it on every billboard, in every aisle of the grocery store, on every restaurant menu, &c. (see the Suicide Food blog displays some of the more egregious cases). I have had many conversations with meat-eaters who were clearly bothered by my veganism and were determined to find an inconsistency in hopes that they could justify their behavior and, hopefully, bring me back into the fold. In short, evangelizing. The evangelizing is such a constant part of the background noise of life, that many, like the author above, are not even aware of it.
Here’s one from Chrome:
Cute icon! Funny phrase! I guess those are supposed to distract us from the total uselessness of the error message.
A while back I happened upon a “defensive omnivore bingo” card at veganporn, I then found the original, a revised version, a more artistic version, a feminist version, and many reposts.
As an exercise for learning Jquery, I wrote a javascript enabled version which picks random statements from a long list including ones from the versions above and some of my own. I started to add answers to some of the statements in popups. You can even place chips on the squares (by clicking), but the “bingo” is entirely anti-climactic. I actually started writing this months ago, but I just worked out a couple of annoying bugs. Feel free to send me any suggestions for additional statements and/or answers.
Back in 1992 or so I was writing an email-based trouble-ticket system which tried to match up incoming emails to existing trouble-tickets by looking at the In-Reply-To: email header. Much to my chagrin, I found that a few email programs did not add this header when replying to messages. So I had to add a set of kludges to hook together tasks that were mistakenly broken by such email messages, and some subject-line shenanigans to allow tasks to be manually specified.
Well, in those days, email was a new thing, and so some amount of ignorance was understandable. 20 years later, we have managed to add those couple of lines of code into every email program, right? Such hope is misplaced. While wrestling to get threading to work properly in Thunderbird, I find that it is still a problem! Viz, “The bad news is that not all e-mail clients actually generate these message headers.” Now we aren’t talking about some ancient text-based email programs (ironically, they all got it right back in 1992, it was the Mac which was broken), the example given in the next sentence is Yahoo!
While, I know, first hand, about dealing with these sort of broken email threads, it is sad that Thunderbird cannot get it right; none of the semi-hidden settings allow it to join together the multitude of broken email threads in my inbox.
The key to working with computers, it seems, is lowering your expectations.
I got this error, which definitely wins the quantity over quality prize:
23:56:50,545 [main] INFO historyLogger:84 - EXCEPTION CAUGHT: org.polarion.svnimporter.ccprovider.CCException: java.io.IOException: No space left on device
at org.polarion.svnimporter.ccprovider.internal.CCContentRetriever.getContent(CCContentRetriever.java:94)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.svnprovider.internal.actions.SvnAddFile.calculateLengthAndChecksum(SvnAddFile.java:104)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.svnprovider.internal.actions.SvnAddFile.dump(SvnAddFile.java:83)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.svnprovider.internal.SvnRevision.dump(SvnRevision.java:127)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.svnprovider.SvnDump.dump(SvnDump.java:191)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.main.Main.saveDump(Main.java:221)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.main.Main.run(Main.java:91)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.main.Main.main(Main.java:49)
Caused by: java.io.IOException: No space left on device
at java.io.FileOutputStream.writeBytes(Native Method)
at java.io.FileOutputStream.write(FileOutputStream.java:260)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.common.Util.copy(Util.java:303)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.common.FileCache.put(FileCache.java:72)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.common.FileCache.put(FileCache.java:87)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.ccprovider.internal.CCContentRetriever.getContent(CCContentRetriever.java:90)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.svnprovider.internal.actions.SvnAddFile.calculateLengthAndChecksum(SvnAddFile.java:104)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.svnprovider.internal.actions.SvnAddFile.dump(SvnAddFile.java:83)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.svnprovider.internal.SvnRevision.dump(SvnRevision.java:127)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.svnprovider.SvnDump.dump(SvnDump.java:191)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.main.Main.saveDump(Main.java:221)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.main.Main.run(Main.java:91)
at org.polarion.svnimporter.main.Main.main(Main.java:49)
So, after that deluge of “information”, all I know that I ran out of space on a filesystem. Which filesystem, you ask? If they told us that would ruin the fun of this guessing game!
The stack trace is a nice touch, since it provides little useful information, like what parameters were being passed, etc. I used to display stack traces like this for my own programs, but have stopped doing so as they didn’t provide as much information as a well-written error message. This stack trace is much like driving directions which consist solely of the phrases “turn right” and “turn left”, but no street names, distances or landmarks. Largely useless.
I’m sitting in a doctor’s waiting room looking at a diet/nutrition magazine, which really seems to be a “how much meat and cheese can we squeeze in and still be healthy” sort of magazine. I just ran into the “special diets bookshelf” section and see a vegan cookbook listed. The reviewer says
… with dozens of recipes each proving that “lactose free,” “ethical” and “environmentally sustainable” are not synonymous with boring or difficult.
If readers weren’t thinking that being a vegan was boring or difficult before they read that, they are now. Everyone knows that doing ethical or environmentally sustainable things must always take a back seat to taste. However, if a chef cannot make an interesting or flavorful vegan dish, they are incompetent. Any moron can throw a slab of flesh onto a plate and and have a flavorful meal. Many do.
My comment about ex-vegans in a previous post was, apparently, ahead of its time. Recently, a couple of newly ex-vegans have blogged about their experiences, and while there have been a number of good responses, including this, this, this and this. I wanted to address a different angle.
I have run into several ex-vegans (or ex-vegetarians) over the years and have recently started to think of them more as “born again meat eaters”. Like the stereotypical born again Christian, they hang onto a pile of partly-understood rationalizations for what they are doing, believe they have discovered absolute truth, and won’t shut up.
But a recent posting from an ex-vegan has shown that I forgot something: a religious experience. Here are some excerpts (emphasis added):
My first bite of meat after 3.5 years of veganism … I just ate, and ate, and ate. I cried in grief and anger, while moaning with pleasure and joy. … my face felt warm, my mind peaceful, and my stomach full but….I searched for a word to describe how it felt….comfortable. I had only eaten a small piece of cow flesh, and yet I felt totally full, but light and refreshed all at once. … How beautiful it felt to be able to eat the exact thing that for so long my body had been begging for. I felt profoundly joyful in finally listening to the wisdom of my body. What a revelation.
She didn’t eat a steak, she saw Jesus! But the miracle continues!
Then I noticed something else odd: my heart was beating slowly, steadily. … my heart was in perfect shape. … Now after eating a single piece of steak, my heart thudded on, steady, strong, and slow. It made me cry all over again, this time in joy.
I am healed! Praise the Lord! Amen and pass the butter!
Thunderbird popped this one up one day:
I cannot remember the context, but then I shouldn’t have to! So, basically some unspecified operation failed, for an unknown reason. It’s nice they mentioned the network connection didn’t get cleaned up, though it’s rather useless information since I don’t know what should be done about it, let alone what the impact is. As a programmer I can guess that the dangling network connection is just a minor adminstrative detail which will get cleaned up on the next reboot. But I can imagine my mother getting this error message and being worried that viruses or spammers are going to sneak onto her computer this way.
There is a fine line between being user friendly and treating people like morons. It is apparent that some programmers think that users cannot be presented with meaningful details of error situations as it will scare or intimidate them. This crosses the line and is simply insulting. Case in point (from Google Chrome):
Wow, that’s terribly uninformative. In this case, I am trying to debug a mod_rewrite configuration (a Sisyphean task, to be sure) and I did figure out how to dig in and see the real error message, which distills down to this:
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; color: #444444;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">404 Not Found -- The requested URL /cgi-bin/w.pl was not found on this server.</span></span>
Let’s think about this from a different context, if I was getting a bug reported against my web site, which error message would I prefer to be provided? The former would be utterly useless, and I would have to go back to the person and have them do a “view source” so I could see the real error message. It would have been trivial to include the error message from the server verbatim and there’s no valid reason to exclude it, except, perhaps, to keep from scaring them :)
Some years ago I ran into a piece of code which shocked me, and in the time since then I have realized that it exemplified a lot of what is wrong with software. Sadly, I have since lost the code, so here is an approximation:
unless (open(F, "/some/important/file"))
{
# We don't want to scare the users with an error message
# warn "Unable to read config file";
}
Am I the only one who is outraged by this? What is scarier to a user, to get an error message when a genuine error situation occurred or let the software plod on getting even stranger and more non-sensical errors which cascade from this initial problem? For example, imagine the following code further on:
my $req = $http->request($config->{url});
die "Unable to contact web server $config->{url}\n" unless $req;
The config structure was empty because it could not be read due to the earlier problem, so the error message simply says “Unable to contact web server”. So now you are led to believe that the problem is with some unspecified web server. How much time will you waste trying to track that down?
So which is worse, “scared” or confused and frustrated?
To kick off my error message “hall of shame” series, I thought I should share my all-time favorite. I got this one many years ago, I was minding my own business and suddenly this pops up in the middle of my screen:
I did not have the presence of mind to take a screenshot back then, so this is “faked” from memory, but all the essentials are here: An empty title bar, so I have no idea which program generated the error, the “unknown error” deepens the mystery and the “ok” button serves as a cruel, taunting punchline.
I never figured out which program issued this error, everything seemed to continue normally. Great mysteries, indeed.
The Oct 9th issue of New Scientist had an article titled “Eating Skippy?” written by a now, former vegetarian about the merits of eating the flesh of Kangaroos.
I like to think of former vegetarians (and vegans) more as “born-again meat eaters”. Like some born-again Christians, they often hang onto a pile of partly-understood rationalizations for what they are doing, believe they have discovered absolute truth, and won’t shut up.
Fortunately the author of this article doesn’t seem to be one of these. Her article seems to be pretty compelling, but in the end it shows that if you do something for the wrong reason, it won’t stick.
There are a number of reasons one might become vegan: for health benefits, for reducing environmental impacts, to imitate a celebrity (that’s what PETA counts on), for animal welfare or for animal rights. The problem is that all reasons except the last one are arguable, and only a few rationalizations from vanishing.
The article does show that Kangaroos consume less water and food and produce fewer greenhouse gasses than other animals. Oops! there goes the environmental arguments. She also shows that flesh is more healthy than that of other animals. There goes the health reasons.
Kangaroos are very easily stressed, and that stress ruins the taste of their flesh. Therefore they can’t be confined and must be free-range; they can only be hunted in the most stealthy manner, which means they know nothing of their fate until the moment the bullet enters their skull. And there goes the animal welfare reasons.
The article does mention “animal rights” at a few points, but, as is so often the case, it ends up confused with “animal welfare”. Here are the two mentions of “animal rights”: “Many animal rights groups remain opposed to kangaroo harvesting, saying it is cruel…” and “Animal rights groups, such as Australia’s Voiceless, say any orphaned young at foot will starve to death.” This shows that most groups which use the phrase “animal rights” are really welfarist groups. And, while I don’t know if the author intended this, these statements are strawmem: by using the phrase “animal rights” but then bringing up welfare concerns, which are easily dealt with (q.v.), the implication is that the animal rights concerns can be dismissed.
But the animal rights argument is straightforward: Kangaroos are sentient beings and we have no right to kill them. But that wouldn’t fill four pages of a magazine, now would it?
There’s an old joke told many years ago by those who didn’t like Unix:
Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes any mistake, a giant “?” lights up in the center of the dashboard. “The experienced driver”, he says, “will usually know what’s wrong.”
I’m sure the early versions of ed inspired this. Though in those days, when every byte counted, a certain level of terseness was understandable. And the software was simple enough that there were a limited number of things which could be going wrong.
But now our computers are orders of magnitude bigger and more complicated. We have layer upon layer of drivers, libraries and applications, which nobody can understand in their entirety. And we still have a giant “?” lighting up on our dashboard. The combination of sloppy (or nonexistent) error handling and poor error reporting, means that we all encounter incomprehensible or meaningless out-of-context error messages on a regular basis. Increasingly, I feel that this is the key problem with computers these days: we expend much of our time, energy and morale to the struggle of figuring out what the latest incomprehensible error message means.
Therefore, I will be devoting some time here to cataloging terrible error messages I run into and some of the bad programming practices that lead to them. I thought I should provide some warning (and context) before I vent my spleen.
I just migrated this site to Laughing Squid’s new cloud hosting and upgraded WordPress. I’ve been hoping to get this blog going again, as I have a bunch of rants bottled up, but it has been a very busy year: My daughter just turned two, we moved across the country last year and the house has needed a lot of work.
I debated setting up separate blogs for the different topics of concern to me, but I figured that’s just too much work, so there will be an odd mix of topics here including: veganism (from an abolitionist viewpoint), bicycling, gardening and various computer programming topics.
Considering this is my first post pretty much since my daughter was born, I’m sure I’m talking to an empty room. That’s ok, I’m used to it. But this post at least will explain the long gap and the change in focus.
Since there isn’t much traffic on 124th Avenue and it doesn’t generally go anywhere useful, Bellevue decided to put a bike lane on it. That isn’t quite fair. There numerous houses in that neighborhood, so if you live there and are commuting into downtown here’s the baffling situation which will greet you as you approach 8th Street. Rather than do something logical, like put up a sign that says “bike lane ends” and simply stop the lane marker, they chose to instead force cyclists towards the curb, twice! Since the bike lane marker doesn’t end properly, car drivers get no indication that they may actually need to expect bicyclists to merge with traffic in order to get to the intersection with 8th St, so they zoom right past blissfully ignorant of your plight. So really, this bike lane translates to “get off the road”, but that title would get monotonous.
NE 8th Street is pretty frightful place to ride, with the worst part being the I-405 overpass which I generally call a “wrongful death lawsuit waiting to happen”. Fortunately for the inevitable victims, Overlake Hospital is right next door. But once you get to the other side of the freeway there are fragments of bike lane! One helpfully appears on the westbound side at 120th Ave, right as you begin scaling a steep hill. But once you get to the top, around 123rd, the bike lane gradually loses about 1 foot of its width, which means you’re just a hair’s breadth away from the Mercedes SUVs piloted (to use the term very loosely) by the gesticulating, bluetooth enabled maniacs.
Something tells me that with my bike buckets and produce box (see photo), I’m wider than that lane. Retreat to the sidewalk!