Duane Gran’s log of thoughts

On November 23 we celebrate Thanksgiving. It is a time for reflection on the many blessings we hold dear, yet the day after is a time for being unsatisfied with our blessings and filling the void with commerce. How one can go from thankfulness to the orgy of commerce known as Black Friday I’ll never understand. This Friday will yet again be Buy Nothing Day in my household. I encourage you to also prolong the sprit of thankfulness and to count your blessings well beyond the Thursday feast.

A particular portion of the scripture has spoken to me for years about being grateful. Luke 17:11-14 describes how Jesus healed ten people of leprosy. The scripture goes on to say:

One of them, when he saw that he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him — and he was a Samaritan.

Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” Then he said to him, “Rise and go: your faith has made you well.”

My sincere hope is to live like the one who gave thanks, not like the other nine. The decision is ultimately personal, but resisting consumerism during the holidays is a meaningful protest. It keeps me thankful for what I have and aware that the grace given thus far is sufficient.

For software developers, how many times have you been tasked with solving a bug which involves some mysterious sequence of steps by a user? This frequent task usually goes like this:

1. Ask the user what he did (user can’t remember)
2. Look in log files (log files may lack detail)
3. Make a good faith effort to reproduce the error and fix it

I’m fond of maxim from Martin Fowler, who explains that fixing bugs is easy, but finding them is hard. What can we do to bridge the information gap to explain why software blows up? I think one answer may be to implement log files as a script.

What this means is that user interaction (which could also be machine rather than a flesh and blood user) is recorded to a type of log which could be executed or re-interpreted into the same steps again. Some types of bugs, particular timing-sentive ones, wouldn’t be solved this way, but it would go a long way toward reducing ambiguity in error reporting. I searched around but didn’t see any implementation of the idea, but I’m curious if anyone can punch some holes in it. Would this be useful?

I’m saddened to learn about the behavior of students at my alma mater who disrupted a speech by David Horowitz. I’m no fan of Mr. Horowitz and his crowd of Marxists who slid into neo-conservativism, but I’m aghast at the behavior of people who can’t issue an intellectual disagreement.

It’s terribly ironic given that the speaker’s premise is that freedom of expression is constrained by leftist ideology in universities. I disagree with his thesis, but the people who attempt to suppress his right to speak about it do us all a disservice. Horowitz agrees in a sense:

Yet three years later, the issues that I raised — the lack of intellectual diversity on campuses and the intrusion of political agendas into the curriculum — have become topics of discussion at colleges throughout the country. This July, moreover, Temple University became the first institution to adopt a student bill of rights as a response to my challenge.

How did this happen? Oddly enough, no small part of my success can be attributed to my opponents’ tactics.