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Open endings

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One of the more common criticisms of Dreaming in Code is that some people are disappointed the book ends without a clear resolution to the Chandler story (which was still unfolding at the beginning of 2006, as I wrapped up my work on the book, and is still unfolding today). So my ears perked up last week as I listened to NPR’s Weekend Edition and heard its film critic, Elvis Mitchell, defending the David Fincher movie Zodiac (which I haven’t seen and have no opinion about) from Scott Simon’s complaint that it lacked a satisfying wrap-up. Mitchell argued that the whole movie is an homage to the ’70s indie-film aesthetic and that a willingness to tell stories without providing a traditional ends-tying conclusion was a hallmark of that era’s directors.

Here’s the passage:

SIMON: The film doesn’t tie anything together with a pretty — or in this case, since you’re talking about a murder, an ugly — series of bows. I know it’s real life, I know there was no way of avoiding it; but I found tht dramatically unsatisfying — to go through this long movie, and not have that at the end.

MITCHELL: It’s so funny you say that, Scott, because that’s a ’70s movie ethic — they’d say, basically, you can’t say that things are tied up anymore, these aren’t John Wayne movies, these aren’t Jimmy Stewart movies, these aren’t Henry Fonda movies. The real act of creative bravery in Zodiac is to follow with that, and to say that this is what these movies were, these movies that influenced me as a filmmaker, and I’m going to use that here, in a case where people really want that kind of closure, and not give it to them.

I can’t claim that my choice to conclude Dreaming in Code the way I did was any sort of statement of allegiance to authors or auteurs past. More, it was just a belief that, in non-fiction, you’d better let the shape of the story be dictated by reality and not wishful thinking.

Dreaming in Code on KQED Forum, Tuesday

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I should be on KQED Forum tomorrow (Tuesday) at 10 AM Pacific time, if all goes as planned, talking about Dreaming in Code. Tune in — or call in!

I’ve now concluded my two week stint in the Well’s Inkwell conference — a slow-motion interview about the book that goes a little deeper in various ways than some of the other conversations I’ve had about the book. (Unlike most stuff on the Well, this is “world-readable” — no membership required.)

Beginning to see the light

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I don’t read the East Bay Express as much as I used to since it lost its old-style Berkeley individuality and got swallowed up by the big alt-weekly chain that is now known as Village Voice Media. But I stumbled on this very funny interview in it today, in which a hapless music writer quizzes Lou Reed about his soundtrack for a new Tai Chi DVD.

I was in the audience last fall at the Web 2.0 conference when Reed’s iceberg-like self-possession collided with the tanker of the Web industry elite’s smug self-regard — a fiasco set up through the offices of then-AOL honcho Jonathan Miller, who explained that he and Reed met because they study with the same Tai Chi master. So Reed’s martial-arts enthusiasm didn’t come as the surprise to me that it seems to have for the Express writer.

What do you say to the people who can’t reconcile your classic Velvet Underground druggy image with this healthy New Age one?

“That was forty years ago!” he implores. “This is 2006! 2007! My God! I can’t worry about things like that. If I did, I wouldn’t do anything! I can’t live in 1967 for people. That’s crazy. I have a broader palette. Everything I do, I’ve always tried to do the best that I could as honestly as I could from wherever space I was viewing things at the time. I can’t satisfy everyone, and I’m not trying to.”

[tags]Lou Reed, martial arts, tai chi, dvds, east bay express[/tags]

Damien Cave in Baghdad

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I worked with Damien Cave for years at Salon, where he did great work for our technology section. Several years ago he decamped for New York and ended up at the New York Times. He’s now reporting from Baghdad.

I’ve been catching up on reading some old papers that I neglected during the frenzy of my book launch. This morning I read his two-week-old piece “‘Man Down’: When One Bullet Alters Everything.” It’s a remarkable bit of eyewitness reporting from Haifa Street in central Baghdad, just outside the Green Zone, where Cave accompanied an American platoon on a sweep. It’s about the difficult choices facing U.S. forces trying to coordinate with Iraqis who are ostensibly leading the mission. It’s about the terrors and horrors facing Iraqi residents of the torn city. But mostly it’s about the choices and emotions encountered by the young American soldiers when one of their sergeants is struck down by a sniper. It is entirely sympathetic to the embattled Americans at the same time it illuminates how futile their effort is.

Perhaps the next time President Bush calls a press conference, the White House correspondents could collectively agree to stop wasting their time asking questions of a leader who will not give truthful answers — and instead, each read a sentence from this article, telling the president a story about what his mistakes have wrought.

“Code” on Marketplace, in Washington Post

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While I was stuck with my family at an airport for hours today waiting for the airline to figure out how to start the plane’s engines (no kidding), elves were at work extending my national sway. Or at least, I could say, work I had previously finished was making its way toward the public.

The Marketplace interview is online now, here. And I’ve got an op-ed in tomorrow’s Washington Post. Both of these are pegged to the occasion of Windows Vista finally heaving itself across the finish line.

Dreaming in Code on Marketplace

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If all goes as planned, today’s edition of Marketplace, the Public Radio business show, will include an interview with me about the book, Windows Vista, and the challenges of making software. I had an enjoyable talk with Kai Ryssdal, the host, last week. I’ve been traveling with my family this weekend, but I’ll be posting more soon…

Some early returns

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Dreaming in Code isn’t in stores till Tuesday, but there’s already been quite a bit of coverage.

Today saw Paul Boutin’s review in the Wall Street Journal (subscriber-only content, I’m afraid). I’m very happy the Journal chose to assign my book to a writer with Boutin’s experience and expertise in the software world. Also pleased with the review’s length and prominence. And I loved the illustration — a Sisyphus shouldering a boulder of code.

One thing Boutin noted made me smile as I read it: “His goal seems to be to teach non-programming managers not how to fix late projects, but how to accept them.” I can just see myself hanging out the guru shingle and peddling the Zen of project management!

In truth, my goal wasn’t to teach anyone anything. I neither promise nor deliver bullet-points of how-to advice. For me, the best non-fiction provides readers with an initiation into the complexity and fascination of a world that they barely even knew existed. I’m happiest when I hear from a reader who feels that I accomplished at least some of that.

But certainly I came to the conclusion, based on the evidence, that late software projects are — maybe not forever, but probably in our lifetimes — a fact of life. They are like quarreling among children or rebelliousness in adolescents. These are things we can mitigate, certainly, and learn to cope with better, or even sometimes turn to our advantage. But we are foolish if we think we can “fix” them or eliminate them. Sanity dictates some sort of accommodation with this kind of reality.

Boutin also concluded the review with a question to me about the principle I jokingly dub “Rosenberg’s Law” in the book. I actually have a lot to say about in response. But I must leave that for a post of its own!

Scott Berkun, who unlike me really does have a lot to teach people about how to avoid the pitfalls of bad project management, has also written up a measured and well-reasoned response to the book. And Rick Kleffel has some entertaining thoughts on the topic even before reading the book:

One of the most interesting aspects of my interview with Vernor Vinge was the point where we talked about what might suggest that we were or were not going to experience the Singularity in a manner described by most science fiction writers. Vinge suggested that the failure or success of large-scale software development projects would be a fine way to measure our progress towards the Infocalypse. Judging by the events described in ‘Dreaming in Code’, well, it appears that the Singularity Is Not Quite So Near as one might hope, if one were to hope It Is Near.

Good reads

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I’ve got a little link backlog. Let’s do something about it!

  • Earlier this week Jay Rosen wrote a remarkable essay about the recent kerfluffle in the right-wing blogosphere over charges that AP reporters in Iraq had made up a source. The excitable warbloggers, understandably dejected that they’ve lost the battle both on the ground and in the American public, grew excited at the thought of MSM blood. But it turned out the entire charge was bogus — the source was real.

    Rosen parses the motives and suggests that the warblog crowd would have done their cause a favor by being more critical of the Bush administration’s reality-evasion from the start:

    For Bush supporters who soldier on, the choices resemble what the go-getters from Enron faced: confront the bad accounting that’s gone on for years or adopt even more desperate measures to conceal losses and keep your hand alive. But if the AP had fabricated a source and relied on that source 60 times, maybe the tables could be turned again and the reckoning put off….

    If you really wanted Bush to succeed in Iraq, and you noticed that he could never be wrong or accept that bad news bearers could be right, this was a warning sign that the warbloggers themselves, as friends of the president’s project, should have taken the lead in discussing. Why didn’t they?

    The children of Agnew have been fully on his side, soldiers in his struggle, happy warriors with Bush because they believe in their red state bones the press is biased against them. Like him they also disbelieve the bad news on principle, and then find someone more loyal to look into it.

  • Michelle Goldberg’s recent Salon interview with Chris Hedges on fundamentalism in America and his new book, American Fascists, is also a great read: One passionate reporter who’s immersed in a fascinating subject interviewing another, equally obsessed.
  • Finally — this one’s a month old, but I’m just catching up — Clive Thompson’s New York Times magazine piece on open source spying. Can wikis and blogs really help the intelligence establishment do a better job assessing terrorist threats? It seems outlandish, but it grows on you the more you think about it (and read Thompson’s explanations).

    This passage rung my Dreaming in Code bell:

    The blog seemed like an awfully modest thing to me. But Meyerrose insists that the future of spying will be revolutionized as much by these small-bore projects as by billion-dollar high-tech systems. Indeed, he says that overly ambitious projects often result in expensive disasters, the way the F.B.I.’s $170 million attempt to overhaul its case-handling software died in 2005 after the software became so complex that the F.B.I. despaired of ever fixing the bugs and shelved it. In contrast, the blog software took only a day or two to get running. “We need to think big, start small and scale fast,” Meyerrose said.

    One of the big problems the agencies have, even with their closed networks, is persuading intelligence officers to share information. On the one hand, their desire to protect sources is understandable; on the other, the information doesn’t do the U.S. any good unless it gets circulated to people who can assess its significance.

    Is this the sort of information that is safe to share widely in an online network? Many in the intelligence agencies suspect not. Indeed, they often refuse to input sensitive intel into their own private, secure databases; they do not trust even their own colleagues, inside their own agencies, to keep their secrets safe. When the F.B.I. unveiled an automated case-support system in 1995, agents were supposed to begin entering all information from their continuing cases into it, so that other F.B.I. agents could benefit from the collected pool of tips. But many agents didn’t. They worried that a hard-won source might be accidentally exposed by an F.B.I. agent halfway across the country. Worse, what would happen if a hacker or criminal found access to the system?

[tags]journalism, fundamentalism, intelligence, open source spying[/tags]

Reality-checking Bush, and editing him

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On the Times op-ed page, Anthony Cordesman offers a devastating reality check on the Bush speech — made all the more withering for its even-handed calm.

Too bad that, in the print version, the type is so tiny; and in the online version, the critique is literally hidden from view until you click. This material should be highlighted, not buried.

The president’s speech offered the administration’s first grudging admission, after four years, that things aren’t as they should be in Iraq. But the phrasing was classic CEO buck-avoidance:

“Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.”

Consider the different emotional impact of applying a simple Strunk and White transformation to the statement:

“We made mistakes, and I’m responsible for them.”
[tags]president bush, iraq, new york times, language, usage[/tags]

An interview and a profile

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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Ed Cone about Dreaming in Code. I first met Cone years ago when he was organizing the panel I spoke on at the first BloggerCon. I’ve always enjoyed his work; like me, he’s someone who is equally interested in politics and technology, and blogs about both of them.

The Cone interview is now up at CIO Insight. It was fun to talk about the issues in the book for a relatively expert readership, where I could skip over some of the basics and jump right to the harder questions. Cone did a great job of drawing me out and then trimming the verbal excess from my responses.

CIO Insight: Are we just being impatient with a branch of knowledge that is still fairly new? Or is there something inherent to software development that makes it so weird and vexing?

Rosenberg: You get one perspective that says, hey, we now have a computer on every desk that does things that were unimaginable 20 years ago, and they’re all connected in this network that gives us instant answers and instant connections. These are miraculous things. And then you find other people who say, you know what? We’re still writing code basically by picking out characters one at a time, we still have programs that are laid low when a single bug creeps in, we still have projects that take ten times longer than they should, we need to rethink everything from the ground up.

I don’t have an answer between them. My personal temperament is more towards the optimistic. In the end, what you’ve got is this industry that’s been conditioned by Moore’s Law, and by its own fantastic financial success, to assume that the curve is always an upward curve, that everything gets better at an exponential pace. That’s the experience of the technology industry. You have that smacking up against the reality of human experience, of creativity, of people working in teams. We have these basic human factors, psychology, the limits of the conceptual capacity of the human brain—things that do not move at an exponential pace. They simply don’t. They tend to move linearly, if they are improving at all. People in the technology industry are loath to accept that.

This theme is also at the heart of another piece that occupied me for a considerable part of the fall — a profile of Charles Simonyi that is on the cover of the new issue of Technology Review. I covered Simonyi and his Intentional Software project just a little bit in Dreaming in Code, and I’m grateful to Jason Pontin at TR for giving me the chance to look at him, and it, more fully.

The first part of the profile, “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta,” is up at the TR Web site now; the second part is slated to go up tomorrow. Since the piece was written as one integral whole, you might want to wait till you can read it all at once — I’ll post the link. It was fun to be writing for print again, and Technology Review is looking very spiffy these days, so this is one that you just might be better off reading on paper.
[tags]charles simonyi, ed cone, technology review[/tags]