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Son of Devil's AdvocateStan Kelly-Bootle
Signs of Age
There's one of those many Churchill stories, hard to pin down by
date or truth (but what-the-hell), that has the Great Man [ref 1]
arriving late for a speech. He tears up his notes, and gravely
announces "I had planned today to extol the virtues of
punctuality." I'm suffering the self-same irony, having chosen
the title "Signs of Age" some months ago, then finding that this
ninth SODA column was running late, in spite of Don
Winterhalter's gentle prodding. Signs of age, indeed, after over
forty-five years of being the Editors' prompt, on-the-dot dream
scrivener. "We don't want le mot juste," was the Publishers'
famous cry, "we want le mot Tuesday." I suppose that the recent
shift of some of my columns from hard-copy to soft-web-content
has influenced my work-flow. Indeed, the very concept "deadline"
has "softened" at internet speed [ref 2]. Both code and comment
are bandied and updated with all the volatile care associated
with an
Yet, the unaccustomed SODA delay, whereby the October column may
not reach you until the last week in September, does demand an
apology and explanation.
I was rash enough to plan a grand b'day (pronounced bidet?) bash
on September 15th. Fifty of my closest friends took the billing
"My Final Such" literally and flew in to Point Richmond from
Oakland, Georgia, and Malaysia to pay their last respects. A
rare, uplifting reunion with old UNIX and CS colleagues such as
Steve Bourne, Bob Toxen, and George Ledin, and folk-song pals
such as Shay Black and Riggy Rackin, that left me nackered for
days. Not to mention all the ex-pat, hard-drinking soccer yobbs
from the Mad Dog In The Fog pub! Nor a moving array of ex- and
putative wives -- but I digress.
George pointed out the "primeness" of my life: my age (71); my
birth-year (1929); my Cambridge graduation year (1953).
The cake, supplied by RougeHilda, exhausted the Bay Area supply of candles, but bore the optimistic Wagnerian slogan "Zu neuen Taten" urging her fading Siegfried to meet the next deadline!
See youse all again at my next prime, really-final ceilidh?
UNIX Review -- 15 Years Ago
Devil's Advocate -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, October, 1985
You have 1 Files in 1 Directories
This month I return to the subject of letters, not only the
individual, embittered 7-ch characters as codified by the
eponymous Sir Arthur Askey (the Hammurapi of Holland Park), but
also the tangled strings thereof which we send and receive with
such reckless abandon via the random packet switching system
known as the Postal Service. To the traditional hazards of sleet
and snow, unchained dogs and unnumbered houses, randy homemakers
and Canadian Zip Codes, we must now add the thousand natural
glitches that bedevil our electronic mail, a la modem de chez
nous. The whole of CommBiz seems to have hoisted a defiant
banner proclaiming "No Pasaran!"
Beyond the theoretically avoidable impediments of fickle
filters, clogged pipes and wicked gates, our messages run
epistemological gauntlets that are quintessentially impenetrable,
such as this sentence.
The often misascribed Kelly-Bootle Uncertainty Principle,
which I have proved elsewhere (op. cit., ibid., et seq., et al.,
more), makes it clear that complete accuracy in both the message
and its delivery is impossible. If you fix the content of a
message, there is an non-zero error in achieving the desired
destination; likewise, if you insist on correct routing you must
pay the price in the form of data degradation. In the real
tariff-ridden world, transmission errors are cunningly spread
between the two: message distortion and misrouting. This, of
course, explains why you get so much junk - the good stuff is
going to someone else.
The Uncertainty Principle applies with greater frustration
at the micro level. Programmers meet it daily when they try to
pass parameters from one module to another. The "software
crisis" boils down to the impossibility of getting both the
pointer and the pointee correct at the same time. Clever chips
like the Motorola M68000 offer some help in detecting errors; the
BRTS instruction, for example, is the postal equivalent of
"Return to Sender, Address Unknown."
No amount of humming or Hamming can change my Principle, nor
Shannon's Canon which unites the immutable Laws of Mother Nature
and Ma Bell! I often wonder why so many people waste their time
meddling with the immutable. More Latin and less Logo in the
schools, I say.
The only rational reaction to things unchangeable is good
humored acceptance - looking on the bright side, as exemplified
in my award-winning column. Admittedly, such a philosophy would
ruin Act II of Medea ("Jason, dear, I've been thinking...perhaps
it's best if I slip away quietly and leave the kids with you.")
and o-u-t out goes big, ranting chunks of Shakespeare. In my
"Happy Hamlet" the Prince marries Ophelia and Claudius abdicates
in favor of his nephew.
The above-mentioned fundamental communicative flaws have
not, happily, prevented my vast readership from trying to reach
me with questions, comments and encouraging remarks. From the
few garbled letters which have arrived I can extrapolate
confidently, and apologize to the thousands who must be waiting
in vain for my response.
What you are missing is FORMn.LET, where n is a uniquely
appropriate integer in the range 1-4. When I scan my bookshelves
I see those depressingly large volumes of "Collected Letters" by
authors and composers who, unassisted by WP and WWB, somehow
found the time to correspond so mightily. Incidentally, Wagner
could have saved much effort with my FORM1.LET, a skeletal "Send
me some money" request, freeing him to put some meat on his bony
operatic trifles. If and when my own correspondence, "Yrs Etc. -
From the Desk of SKB - The Golden Years," is published, it will,
I fear, prove to be a somewhat slender and boring tabulation:
PG&E/n=2/08-07-84
and so on.
But, back to those readers' letters which did get through.
"Job-Hunter" writes from Cupertino:
"I have just done my MBA. My next ambition is to do something
useful for mankind provided the money be good, else I would
definitely consider doing something rotten but well-paid. I
understand that AT&T have sound IBM-compatible products but lack
forceful marketing strategies. My successful summer vacation job
at MicroLand, where I won the Salesperson of June Award by
flogging 2 copies of TurboPascal, leads me to believe that I
would make an excellent Marketing Manager. Please help."
Dear Job-Hunter, $ cat form3.let
I hope that the fact that I have online, pre-prepared
answers will not stem your flood of dumb questions.
ref 1: Winnie won World War II for us (with Turing's help), but
never quite survived his Tory reputation as the 1915 Gallipoli
architect and 1920s Strike Breaker. The world was shocked when he
lost the post-victory 1945 election.
ref 2: deadline n. 1 Communications A NACKered line that
rejects all handshakes, however friendly. 2 Scheduling One of
a sequence of vague prophecies; a given date before which
assignments must not be completed. See alsoHARTREE CONSTANT.
(The Computer Contradictionary, SK-B, MIT Press, 1996)
See also, my "Last Word -- Deadlines," Linux Journal, December, 2000.
Liverpool-born Stan Kelly-Bootle has been exposed to computing, on and off
and vice-versa, since 1953 when, after graduating in Pure Mathematics at
Cambridge University, he switched to impure post-grad work on the
wondrous EDSAC I. After some trenching with IBM and Univac in the 1960s
and 70s, Stan opted for self-employment as a consultant, writer, folk-song
revivalist, after-dinner entertainer, and cunning linguist.
His monthly DA ("Devil's Advocate") column ran and ran in UNIX Review (aka
Performance Computing) from 1984 until January 2000 (a date that will
live in infamy) but lives on as SODA ("Son of DA") via www.sarcheck.com
the homepage devoted to UNIX performance.
The latest of his umpteen books are "The Computer Contradictionary" (MIT
Press) and "UNIX Complete" (Sybex). More on his biblio- and disco-graphy
can be found on http://www.feniks.com/skb/ soon
due for its millennial update.
Stan welcomes reader reaction: skb@atdial.net
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