comparecontrast

Obama, Clinton, Microsoft Excel, and OpenOffice.org

politics, technology / /

I recently posted this to my local Linux Users Group mailing list:

Thought y’all would find this interesting – from http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/05/26/fundraising_excel/index.html:

“A milestone of sorts was reached earlier this year, when Obama, the Illinois senator whose revolutionary online fundraising has overwhelmed Clinton, filed an electronic fundraising report so large it could not be processed by popular basic spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel 2003 and Lotus 1-2-3.

Those programs can’t download data files with more than 65,536 rows or 256 columns.

Obama’s January fundraising report, detailing the $23 million he raised and $41 million he spent in the last three months of 2007, far exceeded 65,536 rows listing contributions, refunds, expenditures, debts, reimbursements and other details. It was the first report to confound basic database programs since 2001, when the Federal Election Commission began directly posting candidates’ fundraising reports online in an effort to make political money more accessible and transparent to voters.

By March, the reports filed by Clinton, a New York senator who attributes Obama’s victories in several states to her own lack of money, also could no longer be downloaded into spreadsheets using basic applications.

If you want to comb through Obama or Clinton’s cash, you either need to divide and import their reports section-by-section (a time-consuming and mind-numbing process) or purchase a more powerful database application, such as Microsoft Access or Microsoft Excel 2007, both of which retail for $229.”

Interestingly, OpenOffice.org 2.0 has the same limitation. OpenOffice.org 3 will expand the number of columns to 1024, according to http://www.oooninja.com/2008/03/openofficeorg-30-new-features.html. No idea about how many rows. Anyone know?

OK … looked it up … it appears that the row limit is STILL in place, so you can’t use OOo to open Obama’s or Hillary’s spreadsheets. Of course, you could use MySQL …

Oh yeah … and here’s one more note, from the same Salon article quoted above:

“In a revealing insight into the significant fundraising disparity between the two Democrats and presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, it is still possible to download his reports with plain-old Excel.”

Ouch!

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Language & grammar types: inflected, agglutinative, & analytic

language & literature / /

From Tim Bray’s “On Search: Squirmy Words” (29 June 2003):

Of course, the way that words twist and turn around is highly language-dependent. English is what’s called an “inflected” language, which is to say words change their form depending on their grammatical role: verb conjugation, singular/plural, and so on. (Interestingly, “inflection” has a common variant spelling: “inflexion”.) Other languages (for example Turkish and Finnish) are “agglutinative”, where words are formed by combining “morphemes.” The third most common category of languages is “analytic” or “isolating”, where words do not change and grammatical roles are established by sequences of words. The best-known example is written Chinese.

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Differences between Macintosh & Unix programmers

business, history, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Eric Steven Raymond’s “Problems in the Environment of Unix” (The Art of Unix Programming: 19 September 2003):

Macintosh programmers are all about the user experience. They’re architects and decorators. They design from the outside in, asking first “What kind of interaction do we want to support?” and then building the application logic behind it to meet the demands of the user-interface design. This leads to programs that are very pretty and infrastructure that is weak and rickety. In one notorious example, as late as Release 9 the MacOS memory manager sometimes required the user to manually deallocate memory by manually chucking out exited but still-resident programs. Unix people are viscerally revolted by this kind of mal-design; they don’t understand how Macintosh people could live with it.

By contrast, Unix people are all about infrastructure. We are plumbers and stonemasons. We design from the inside out, building mighty engines to solve abstractly defined problems (like “How do we get reliable packet-stream delivery from point A to point B over unreliable hardware and links?”). We then wrap thin and often profoundly ugly interfaces around the engines. The commands date(1), find(1), and ed(1) are notorious examples, but there are hundreds of others. Macintosh people are viscerally revolted by this kind of mal-design; they don’t understand how Unix people can live with it. …

In many ways this kind of parochialism has served us well. We are the keepers of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Our software and our traditions dominate serious computing, the applications where 24/7 reliability and minimal downtime is a must. We really are extremely good at building solid infrastructure; not perfect by any means, but there is no other software technical culture that has anywhere close to our track record, and it is one to be proud of. …

To non-technical end users, the software we build tends to be either bewildering and incomprehensible, or clumsy and condescending, or both at the same time. Even when we try to do the user-friendliness thing as earnestly as possible, we’re woefully inconsistent at it. Many of the attitudes and reflexes we’ve inherited from old-school Unix are just wrong for the job. Even when we want to listen to and help Aunt Tillie, we don’t know how — we project our categories and our concerns onto her and give her ‘solutions’ that she finds as daunting as her problems.

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How conservatives are like communists

history, politics / /

From Alan Wolfe’s “Why Conservatives Can’t Govern” (The Washington Monthly: July/August 2006):

Eager to salvage conservatism from the wreckage of conservative rule, right-wing pundits are furiously blaming right-wing politicians for failing to adhere to right-wing convictions. …

Conservative dissidents seem to have done an admirable job of persuading each other of the truth of their claims. Of course, many of these dissidents extolled the president’s conservative leadership when he was riding high in the polls. But the real flaw in their argument is akin to that of Trotskyites who, when confronted with the failures of communism in Cuba, China and the Soviet Union, would claim that real communism had never been tried. If leaders consistently depart in disastrous ways from their underlying political ideology, there comes a point where one has to stop just blaming the leaders and start questioning the ideology.

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Cultural differences between Unix and Windows

business, history, technology / /

From Joel Spolsky’s “Biculturalism” (Joel on Software: 14 December 2003):

What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.

This is, of course, a major simplification, but really, that’s the big difference: are we programming for programmers or end users? Everything else is commentary. …

Let’s look at a small example. The Unix programming culture holds in high esteem programs which can be called from the command line, which take arguments that control every aspect of their behavior, and the output of which can be captured as regularly-formatted, machine readable plain text. Such programs are valued because they can easily be incorporated into other programs or larger software systems by programmers. To take one miniscule example, there is a core value in the Unix culture, which Raymond calls “Silence is Golden,” that a program that has done exactly what you told it to do successfully should provide no output whatsoever. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just typed a 300 character command line to create a file system, or built and installed a complicated piece of software, or sent a manned rocket to the moon. If it succeeds, the accepted thing to do is simply output nothing. The user will infer from the next command prompt that everything must be OK.

This is an important value in Unix culture because you’re programming for other programmers. As Raymond puts it, “Programs that babble don’t tend to play well with other programs.” By contrast, in the Windows culture, you’re programming for Aunt Marge, and Aunt Marge might be justified in observing that a program that produces no output because it succeeded cannot be distinguished from a program that produced no output because it failed badly or a program that produced no output because it misinterpreted your request.

Similarly, the Unix culture appreciates programs that stay textual. They don’t like GUIs much, except as lipstick painted cleanly on top of textual programs, and they don’t like binary file formats. This is because a textual interface is easier to program against than, say, a GUI interface, which is almost impossible to program against unless some other provisions are made, like a built-in scripting language. Here again, we see that the Unix culture values creating code that is useful to other programmers, something which is rarely a goal in Windows programming.

Which is not to say that all Unix programs are designed solely for programmers. Far from it. But the culture values things that are useful to programmers, and this explains a thing or two about a thing or two. …

The Unix cultural value of visible source code makes it an easier environment to develop for. Any Windows developer will tell you about the time they spent four days tracking down a bug because, say, they thought that the memory size returned by LocalSize would be the same as the memory size they originally requested with LocalAlloc, or some similar bug they could have fixed in ten minutes if they could see the source code of the library. …

When Unix was created and when it formed its cultural values, there were no end users. Computers were expensive, CPU time was expensive, and learning about computers meant learning how to program. It’s no wonder that the culture which emerged valued things which are useful to other programmers. By contrast, Windows was created with one goal only: to sell as many copies as conceivable at a profit. …

For example, Unix has a value of separating policy from mechanism which, historically, came from the designers of X. This directly led to a schism in user interfaces; nobody has ever quite been able to agree on all the details of how the desktop UI should work, and they think this is OK, because their culture values this diversity, but for Aunt Marge it is very much not OK to have to use a different UI to cut and paste in one program than she uses in another.

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Unix specs vs. Windows specs

business, history, tech help, technology / /

From Peter Seebach’s Standards and specs: Not by UNIX alone (IBM developerWorks: 8 March 2006):

In the past 20 years, developers for “the same” desktop platform (“whatever Microsoft ships”) have been told that the API to target is (in this order):

* DOS
* Win16
* OS/2
* Win32
* WinNT
* WinXP
* and most recently .NET.

Of course, that list is from last year, and now the “stable” target that you should be developing for, if you have an eye for the future, is Vista.

It hasn’t been quite as bad in the Macintosh world, where the number of major API changes has been limited: classic single-tasking Mac OS, classic multitasking Mac OS (System 7), Carbon (System 8/9 and preview of OS X), and Cocoa (OS X), but even there, the cost of migration has been significant. At least OS X finally offers a stable UNIX API for the back-end part of programs, allowing developers to ignore the API creep except in GUI code.

By contrast, twenty-year-old UNIX utilities still compile and run. A new desktop computing API will come and everyone will have to rewrite for it, but mountains will erode away before read() and write() stop working. This is the reason that all the hassle of formal UNIX standards has had so little effect on practical UNIX software development; the core API is simple, clean, and well-designed, and there is no need to change it significantly.

… UNIX users have been switching hardware platforms since the 1970s; it’s no big deal. …

Just as there are many varieties of UNIX, there are many UNIX standards:

* Probably the oldest standard that people still refer to is AT&T’s 1985 System V Interface Definition (SVID). This standard shows up, for instance, in man pages describing the standards compliance of functions that have been in the C library “forever.”
* Meanwhile, X/Open (now the Open Group) was developing “portability guides” with names like XPG2, XPG3, and so on. XPG1 was actually released in 1995. The XPG guides are largely subsumed into newer specs, but once again, are still referred to sometimes in documentation.
* The IEEE’s POSIX standard showed up in 1990 with updates in 1992 and 1993 and a second edition in 1996. It’s still a viable standard, although it has suffered from poor accessibility. POSIX specs have names like 1003.x; for instance, 1003.1 and 1003.2, which refer to different parts of the standard, or 1003.1-1988 and 1003.1-1990, which refer to two versions of the standard.
* The fairly ominous sounding “Spec 1170” (also known as “UNIX 98” or “Single Unix Specification”) is probably the most complete specification; it is produced by the Open Group, and is effectively a descendant of the XPG series. In practice, this is “the” UNIX standard these days, although it’s a little large; this has had an impact on conformance testing.
* The Linux Standards Base is not strictly a UNIX standard, but it’s a standardization effort relevant to a very large number of developers working with code designed to run “on UNIX.” …

You can look at OS specifications in two very different ways: one is from the point of view of a developer trying to port an application, and the other is from the point of view of the user trying to interact with the system.

UNIX conveniently blurs this distinction. The primary user interface is also one of the primary development environments; therefore, UNIX specifications often cover not only the C language API, but also the shell environment and many of the core utilities shell programmers rely on. …

From the perspective of a developer who’s seen many Unix-like systems, Linux is probably mostly sort of similar to System V. The heavy focus on GNU utilities gives a sort of surreal combination of Berkeley and System V features, but if you have to guess whether Linux does something the Berkeley way or the System V way, go with System V. This is especially true of system startup; nearly all Linux systems use the System V /etc/inittab and /etc/rc.d structure, or something very close to it. …

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