The Continuing Adventures of Dr Dzoe

It seems like every day has an “I love the Internet” moment.

Yesterday’s was this: I was sitting on my deck at the beach looking out to sea.  There was a large ship out there, heading north.

Hmm, says I, I wonder what ship it is?

It took about two minutes on the Internet to find it.  It was the Asian Chorus, a car carrier owned by Eukor, due in Baltimore the next morning at 6:00 AM.  All the data I wanted was near at hand.

I love the Internet!

It’s the Fourth of July, and I’m enjoying life at the beach.  What better time to muse on my blog!  And so, two posts in one day – enjoy!

For many years now, I’ve thought that programming bears a strong resemblance to the medieval view of magic.  In writing a program, we create strange incantations in arcane languages that channel forces far from normal human experience.  And if we make even a minor mistake in creating our spell, disaster can occur.  We summon demons to do our bidding, but if we make a mistake in the summoning, the demons are unleashed.

A bit of history: the first time the Internet really achieved mainstream recognition was when Robert Tappan Morris released his worm into the world.  It crashed the Internet back in 1988, years before there was a world-wide web, and the Internet made the front pages of the nation’s newspapers for the first time.  To learn more, see the Wikipedia article on the Morris Worm.

But here’s the thing: Robert Tappan Morris did not intend to do all that damage.  He just wanted to write something that would highlight the vulnerability of many of the computers on the net, that would slip into those computers, slowly propagate, and that he could eventually point to and say, “Look at how insecure we are.”

But Morris’s worm had a bug, and it spawned off copies of itself far faster than he intended.  The damage done was not because the worm did anything terrible: it just sucked up all the resources on the computers where it ran because it forked off copies of itself in an out-of-control fashion.  The graduate student Robert Morris had made a minor mistake in his summoning, and the result was an Internet catastrophe.

Does that remind you of anything?  Imagine Morris as played by Mickey Mouse, think of those copies as animated brooms, and pretend that the crashing servers are water levels rising higher and higher.  Pretty quickly have the Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence from “Fantasia.”

Morris is now a tenured professor at MIT.  Mickey is no longer an apprentice – he is now the master wizard, training others.  I have no information on the state of his plumbing.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke

For the vast majority of humanity, we have achieved Clarke’s vision: our technology is now indistinguishable from magic.

Do you understand what happens when you turn the key to start your car?  Do you know why flipping a switch fills your room with light?  Do you know how that little box that you are staring at brings you these words?

You may at that.  There may be no mysteries for you in these technologies.  But if that’s the case, you are one of the wizards.

We engineers are the wizards of the modern world.  Because if our world operates on magic, and it does, then it needs wizards to keep that magic working, wizards who understand the arcane forces, wizards who extend the power of our magic in new ways.

That is our job.

We are not the kings.  We do not generally run the great corporations or governments, we serve them.  We are the Merlins to the Arthurs, to the presidents, senators, and CEO’s.  (Though there is the occasional Wizard-King – Bill Gates springs to mind.  And while some view him as a wizard-king in the mode of Sauron, I’ll admit to a secret joy in the fact that the richest man in the world is one of us.)  We do not command the world.  But we do in a very real sense run it.

It’s a wonderful thing to be a wizard.  It’s a wonderful thing to master these technologies.  We can do great things for the world, and have plenty of fun doing it.  And as people gaze on these wonders with amazement, we smile, knowing that these are our gifts to the world.

What a great time it is to be a geek!

This past week, I’ve been spending my time installing software of various sorts for my new job.  Much of that has involved doing new things, including finding documentation for things that I need to do online.   In the course of this, I’ve run into a limitation of Google.

Much of the software that I’m installing is relatively new, meaning written within the last five years.  And as popular open source projects, they’ve undergone frequent updates.  And the documentation is not all that great.

But there’s been plenty of people who have shared their experiences in blog posts and others.  And so you’d think that Google would be a great resource to find stuff.

But Google has a big problem in these cases.  One of the major components of Google’s search algorithms is link traversal.  A page that has many links to it is rated higher than one that has no links.  But older pages are far more likely to have links to them – after all, they’ve been around longer for people to find and link to.

As a result, Google search results tend to skew to older pages.  Which is a big problem if you’re looking for information about something that has been around for a little while, but has changed much in that time.  The resources that you find are likely to be out of date.

You can go into advanced search and limit results by date.  But I’d like to see all results, just skewed to the most up-to-date data.

Which goes to show, even the mighty Google is not the perfect solution for all problems.