People ask me what my book (Dreaming in Code) is about, and I usually answer, “It’s about software…” And, if their eyes don’t glaze over immediately, I’ll add, “…and why software is still so hard. Why it’s always late and it’s always breaking. Why we’re 50 years into the computer age and we still don’t know how to make it reliably.”

By this point, one of two things will have happened: either listeners will have nodded and smiled and said, “I know exactly what you mean!” Or their eyes will have eventually glazed over, after all, and they’ll look at me a little quizzically, as if to say, oh really? And why does this matter? What do I care?

I thought about those people as I passed through the BART turnstiles this morning, a little glazed-eyed myself. There, neatly by the attendant’s booth, lay piles of orange flyers under a “BART BULLETIN” letterhead. I grabbed one and read it on the escalator-ride down.

It was an apology for the screwed-up state of BART yesterday morning — which had seen half-hour delays and incorrect train-destination signs. How considerate! A mass transit system that apologizes to you! In my many youthful years of New York City straphanging, I can’t say I ever had that experience.

But this is the paragraph that caught my eye:

BART had botched a software upgrade. It had plenty of company in that experience, of course.

As C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup puts it: “Our civilization runs on software.” BART does, too. And understanding why software remains so balky — a topic I happen to find fascinating in the abstract — also has some everyday, pragmatic interest.

UPDATE: And how. I just tried to get on BART for my ride home this evening but could tell from the milling crowds outside the Embarcadero station something was radically wrong. Walked down the stairs to catch a garbled announcement on the PA: “We have closed the gates… no trains are moving… computer problems…”

I’m grateful for the consideration in illustrating my point, but I’d really rather just be on my way home!

Tonight Salon has posted my double review of Glenn Reynolds’ “An Army of Davids” and “Crashing the Gate,” by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (Daily Kos) and Jerome Armstrong.

It was interesting to me how differently these leading bloggers used the opportunity of a book deal: Reynolds (Instapundit) waxes prophetic about the future of individual empowerment, while Kos and Armstrong narrow their gaze to a tight beam of focus on how the Democrats should proceed if they hope to regain the White House.

In my review, I attempt to relate their blogging styles to their worldviews. As for me, I enjoyed returning to the couple-of-thousand-word Salon format after a year of my own book-length labors, interspersed with short-form blogging here.

Last fall, Salon switched its letters-to-the-editor format from an old-media mode — email us a letter, and maybe we’ll publish it — to a more Web-native model, in which readers post their letters by themselves, and then Salon provides a filter after-the-fact for those readers who still want us to don our editors’ hats.

We’re mostly very happy with the result. Occasionally, of course, there are flamefests, and people go crazy complaining about an article or writer they don’t like or, more often, another letter writer they detest. But more often there are knowledgeable, creative responses to the articles we publish. And sometimes they push a discussion forward in ways we could never have expected. (Some of the letters in response to our Abu Ghraib Files feature, including some from people in uniform, were unforgettable.)

Still, we continue to get a smaller volume of letters to the old e-mail inbox that we still maintain for not-for-publication communications. It is here, inevitably, that certain categories of perennial correspondence continue to pour in.

Over the weekend, we got two in succession: First, there was the borderline-literate note from a reader who had just stumbled upon our 1999 feature on Brazilian bikini waxing — and wanted to know where she could get one. Sorry, can’t help. (I suppose the Salon name doesn’t help these readers disambiguate.)

Then there was the letter-writer who just couldn’t tell Salon apart from that other politics-and-culture Web magazine whose five-letter-name begins with S. When the e-mail begins, “Dear Mr. Weisberg,” we know what we’re dealing with.

Scanning such missives, I find my years at Salon collapsing into a durationless Now, a frozen moment of e-mail eternity.

Cleaning out a reading backlog. Herewith some links, some going back months:

## Fascinating piece from the New York Times last week on the man who wrote the song that became “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”: It started out, in Solomon Linda’s 1939 recording, as “Mbube,” which is pronounced “EEM-boo-bay.” That, in Pete Seeger’s hands, became “Wimoweh.” Then songwriter George Weiss added the “Lion” lyrics. Linda got 10 shillings for the rights in 1952. He died poor in 1962. His family did recently get some money from Disney, which used the song in “The Lion King.” There are over 150 recordings of the song. One is by Brian Eno (I still own a 7-inch single of the 1975 recording, somewhere).

## Writer’s block or creative logjam? Now you don’t have to hunt for a collector’s item edition of Eno’s Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards offering cryptically helpful aphorisms as rut escape strategies. It’s all online. And it’s probably been there forever, but I only found it recently.

## This interview with Ray Ozzie from ACM Queue from a few months ago is a great read. It’s especially insightful about the disparity today between individuals and small businesses and large enterprises — like Microsoft, where Ozzie is now a CTO. Little guys are free to adapt to the newest and most flexible technologies; big enterprises find themselves hogtied not only by the money they’ve already spent on older technologies, but by fear and turf-wars and regulations that make it almost impossible for them to embrace openness and change. Choice quote:

(For the non-Unix geeks out there, a “Unix pipe” is a fast, simple way in that operating system to connect the output of one program to the input of another.)

## Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos provides a crystal clear explanation of what Moore’s Law is and isn’t (it’s not about chips doubling in speed or halving in cost, it’s about doubling the number of transistors you can fit on a chip).

## Find yourself checking for new e-mail every five minutes? You might be a victim of continuous partial attention, but Rands in Repose has a slightly different take on the idea — he calls it Repetitive Information Injury. And a Discover column from Steven Johnson offers some novel ideas for new approaches to computer interfaces that are designed to help us focus more and multitask less when that’s what we want.

## Meanwhile, Paul Graham suggests that procrastination isn’t really a problem if you’re forsaking some dull work that you have to do in order to explore something you love. This advice is easier to act upon after you have sold your startup company, as Graham once did — those in need of a steady income may have greater trouble following his recommendations.

Award for most depressing read in the Sunday paper today goes to Jeffrey Gettleman’s piece from Baghdad, in which the New York Times correspondent, returning to Iraq after a year away, describes the new state of affairs there.

This is the situation that our government is unwilling, for profoundly self-interested reasons, to label “civil war.” It is the worst-case outcome for the American misadventure in Iraq, and we are rapidly sinking toward it.

Gettleman writes: “I recently met a Sunni man who used to be virulently anti-American. He showed me postmortem pictures of his younger brother, who had been kidnapped by death squads and had holes drilled in his face. ‘Even the Americans wouldn’t do this,’ he said.”

Holes drilled in his face.

In the early months of the Iraq occupation, the insurgency was using car-bombs to blow up U.S. soldiers; every now and then, there’d be a beheading. American true believers in the war, stranded by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, would point with anger to this barbaric behavior. “These are the kind of beasts we’re fighting,” they’d cry, and, stoking their anger with outrage at such cruelties, they would find new resolve to pay the war’s escalating costs in dollars and blood.

So what are we to make of people who drill holes in victims’ faces? What new awful depths are trap-dooring open below us? How about this: These new sadists aren’t even on the same team as the others we’ve been fighting. The car-bombing insurgency, the “Al Qaeda in Iraq” beheaders led by Zarqawi, are Sunnis; the new Baghdad slaughterers are radical Shiites. They’re fighting each other, the American-backed Iraqi “unity” government can’t or won’t stop the miserable carnage, and U.S. forces are either unwilling or unable to step in. (Here’s Gettleman’s dispatch for the Monday paper: “American officials are now saying that Shiite militias are the No. 1 problem in Iraq, more dangerous than the Sunni-led insurgents who for nearly the past three years have been branded the gravest security threat.”)

The Samarra attack last month now appears to be the match that lit this civil conflagration. Gettleman, again:

Perhaps it’s time for the American leadership to stop the game of delusional behavior, admit that Iraq is now in the early stages of a civil war, and begin figuring out how to get our forces home before the Sunni-Shiite crossfire decimates them. Or are we going to keep spending $100 billion a year to garrison Iraq with an army that can’t even stop people from drilling holes in faces?

Yesterday’s Journal featured a front-page piece about Encyclopedia Britannica’s counteroffensive against Wikipedia, which apparently will kick in full force next week with big newspaper ads defending the old institution’s honor.

I’m not hugely interested in the Britannica argument about the methodology of a study published in Nature magazine that suggested the cooperatively produced, volunteer online Wikipedia had only a slightly higher error rate than the professional, costly encyclopedia. Defining “error” is a hopeless exercise in this field, and invites infinite angels-on-pinhead arguments.

The point isn’t that anyone would claim Wikipedia’s superiority today: Wikipedia leader Jimmie Wales admits in the piece that he was glad Nature focused on science articles, because Wikipedia is a lot weaker in the humanities and social sciences.

The point is that Wikipedia is just over five years old and, by opening itself to contributions and emendations from anyone anywhere, it has already arrived at a position where comparisons with Britannica don’t produce a laugh-off-the-stage reaction. The story here is about process, not snapshots in time. Wikipedia is on an improvement curve that, if it holds up, Britannica will never be able to match.

The big challenge for Wikipedia now is what the management gurus call “process improvement.” The Wikipedians need to keep figuring out ways to inoculate their work from trolls and defacers. We all need to grapple with the ethics and procedures of correcting information that we’re personally involved in (for instance, I once fixed a small factual error on the spotty Wikipedia page for Salon, then my journalism superego kicked in, and I thought, wait a minute, I shouldn’t be doing this, should I?). New crises and problems will keep arising for Wikipedia, like the Seigenthaler brouhaha last year.

No one argues that Wikipedia is perfect, and I don’t doubt that, for the moment, in the majority of areas, Britannica is more reliable. On the other hand, Wikipedia is free. And it keeps getting better. And it’s only a handful of years old. If I worked for Britannica, I think I’d be worried. But I wouldn’t waste my money on newspaper ads; instead, I’d be investing in research to figure out how a centuries-old institution should adapt to a new information-rich age.

BONUS LINK: My Salon colleague Farhad Manjoo has started a blog recording the odd bits of information he has gleaned from the Wikipedia trove.

Last September the Wall Street Journal ran a fascinating lead article about Microsoft’s Vista development effort. Robert Guth chronicled how the Vista project had initially ballooned as Bill Gates and others piled on their dream features, like the advanced, metadata-rich WinFS file system. When Vista hit trouble, Windows czar Jim Allchin brought in two software development experts, Brian Valentine and Amitabh Srivastava, to whip the project into shape by introducing rigorous new testing methodologies.

Still, by mid-2004 the whole project was in danger of collapsing. Microsoft decided to postpone Vista till “the second half of 2006″ and cut back lots of promised features (including WinFS).

As Guth’s article had it, the result, finally, was a development process Microsoft could begin to be proud of:

When I read the article at the time, I took it as a kind of victory-lap valedictory for Allchin, who’d announced he was retiring once Vista was done. Unless you’re certain of prevailing, though, victory laps are dangerous (just think of the phrase “Mission Accomplished”). With this week’s news of a another slip in the Vista schedule — the software won’t be out until January 2007, after the crucial holiday buying season — we’re left wondering, what happened to that vaunted new process?

Certainly, this widely linked story that claims Microsoft is now going to rewrite 60 percent of the operating system between now and release seems hard to credit (something tells me rewriting that much code would take a lot more than 8 months). But between this embarrassing delay and the recently announced “reorg” of Windows leadership, it’s clear that this turn of the Windows cycle is going to be no smoother or predictable than any of its predecessors.

My book, Dreaming in Code, is all about what I call “software time” — the peculiar spell that software projects so often cast on the people involved, turning schedules into Mobius strips and stretching time like taffy. I imagine that, as Valentine and Srivastava described the beauty of their testing systems to Guth last year, they honestly believed that they’d meet their deadlines. They thought they’d cheated software time. That confidence doesn’t look too smart today.

UPDATE: Steve Gillmor wonders whether maybe there really is 60 percent of the Vista code that needs a rewrite — and much more. Adam Barr, on the other hand, offers some reasons why that notion might be far off-base.

Washington Post says Domenech has resigned. Jim Brady, editor of the Post Web site, writes: “We appreciate the speed and thoroughness with which our readers and media outlets surfaced these allegations. Despite the turn this has taken, we believe this event, among other things, testifies to the positive and powerful role that the Internet can play in the the practice of journalism.”

Yeah. But maybe next time, you know, check out the writer before you make the hire?

If it weren’t so pathetic it would be hilarious.

The Washington Post, caving in to a right-wing campaign against its blogger-columnist Dan Froomkin, recently hired a raging young conservative named Ben Domenech to start a blog called “Red America.”

If it were serious about balance, the Post would then have hired someone like Tom Tomorrow or Kos to bring the scales back to level. But then, they have track records. And they’re not plagiarists.

Domenech, it turns out, spent his college years at William and Mary cribbing whole paragraphs from movie reviews in Salon (and other reviews by Steve Rhodes, and other pieces by P.J. O’Rourke.)

I don’t know which is worse: the act itself or the stupidity of doing so in 1999, as a college student in the Internet era, when you just have to know that it will catch up with you someday.

Shouldn’t he at least have been copying from National Review or the New Criterion? Did he figure none of his conservative pals would read Salon, so he could pilfer with abandon?

However the story plays out — and it will, fast — the black eye for the Post is, sadly, deserved.

Domenech has already posted an apology for complaining that President Bush shouldn’t have attended Coretta Scott King’s funeral because she was a “Communist.” So far, no attempt to explain the multiple acts of plagiarism.

UPDATE: Read Joe Conason’s take. And Salon has a compendium of Domenech’s plagiarisms.

Veteran blogger and writer-about-blogging
Rebecca Blood posted a thoughtful response yesterday following up on my report from the CyberSalon on elitism and blogging. But I confess it left me a little puzzled, because, though she said I “had it wrong,” I’m not sure exactly what she thought I got wrong, since I agree with about three-quarters of what she has to say, and none of what she says seems to contradict what I wrote.

Blood describes a premise that is certainly not mine — in fact, it matches pretty closely the Andrew Keen “Don’t waste my time with your mediocre blogs” position: “The unspoken premise underlying this argument is that books and articles are published commercially because they represent the best writing that is available.” Then she goes on to say, no, really, professional publishing is about “printing books and articles they can sell, nothing more, nothing less.”

Well, sort of. This is part of the picture, I think, but the full picture is a little more complex: Most publications and many publishers have some kind of division of labor between the editorial side and the business side, and the business people are more focused on the selling side of things, while the editorial people tend to concentrate on…editing. Editing means selection, usually according to the tradition of the paper or magazine or house. And that tradition makes assumptions about who the readers are and what they want and expect from the editors. The editors know that if the readers are happy with their choices they’ll keep coming back, and the business will thrive, so there is certainly a business substrate to the whole activity.

Most editors wouldn’t be so imprudent as to claim that they are publishing “the best” anything; usually, they’ll talk about trying to publish “the best” that they can find for their particular readers. The most effective editors have an accurate sense of who those readers are and what they want. Bad editors live in a dream-world; they think they’re serving their readers, but they run in horror from actual contact with actual readers.

So I’d say Blood’s description is oversimplified, incomplete, but not fundamentally wrong. She goes on to write: “Blogs are threatening to a certain type of writer not because they allow mediocre writing to flourish — the commercial market already does that. They are threatening because they unequivocally demonstrate that commercial publishing does not necessarily represent the best writing that is available.”

I think I agree, mostly: it’s great to see how new talent can crawl out of the woodwork on its own today without always having to wait patiently on some gatekeeper’s transom for years, and if that makes some of said gatekeepers uncomfortable, all the better. But I do hear in Blood’s passage a touch of the same absolutism that made Keen’s comments at the CyberSalon so irritating — only inverted. Keen sees mediocrity flourishing in the blogosphere; Blood sees mediocrity flourishing in the professional media.

Well, you know, mediocrity flourishes everywhere! So sayeth Sturgeon’s Law: 90 percent of everything is crud. Further complicating matters, your view of which 10 percent isn’t crud is likely to be different from mine, or Keen’s, or Blood’s. All “bests,” in the end, are subjective. Outside of sports and other scored pursuits, “best” is just another word for “my favorite.”

So the real challenge is to find ways of helping each of us find our way to a higher percentage of the stuff each of us thinks isn’t cruddy. And that’s where I side with Blood and the blogosphere: any new media structure that enables more voices to be heard and found deserves our embrace, because it increases the size of the pool in which we fish for our personal supply of non-crud.

I don’t share Keen’s confidence that we’re already doing such a fantastic job of wheat-from-chaff separating that we can afford to shut our minds to the “anarchy” of the Web. That’s smug and delusional. And I don’t expect to find “bests” — just more “aha”s and “uh-huh”s and “ohhh”s and “wow”s. And that’s more than good enough.

More CyberSalon stuff: Audio from the evening is now posted over at Keen’s AfterTV site.

And Dave Winer posts his thoughts on the event: It doesn’t have to be adversarial between bloggers and pro journalists, he says; in fact, “it mustn’t be adversarial, between us, because we already have a mutual adversary, the Executive Branch of the U.S. government, who would, if they could, completely disempower the press, and control the flow of information to the populace.”