Jinn of Quality and Risk

Wired: A history of computer interfaces follows a nice, tidy timeline. In the 1970s researchers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center invented the basics of the point-and-click interface familiar today: mouse, windows, menus. Apple peeked at the research and brought it to the masses with the Macintosh in 1984. Ten years later, Microsoft copied Apple with Windows 95. ... But many standard features came from a different, unacknowledged source: knowledgeable users and small, independent software developers. 

401 BC, 60 km North of Babylon. Cyrus, who had enlisted Greek help to try and take the throne of Persia from his brother Artaxerxes, dies in battle. Ten thousand Greek mercenaries find themselves trapped in hostile Persian territory. Soon, the Greek generals are treacherously killed. Xenophon, a pupil of Socrates, must then step forth and lead the Greeks on a terrible retreat through inhospitable lands — from the gates of Babylon to the Black Sea. This novel is a re-telling of the story, based on the Anabasis, Xenophon's own, vivid eyewitness account.

Verdict: somewhat entertaining, but weak due to superficial characters, useless plot-devices, unexplained relationships, and lack of passion. More than half of the book is wasted on introducing imaginary events and characters irrelevant to the truly epic part of the tale. Further, the novel ends abruptly, the narrator having claimed that a climax has been reached, when most of the story of the return home still remains to be told, and many of the characters still demonstrate unresolved conflicts, dreams, and goals. The author obviously researched the subject, but unfortunately no Muse blessed him. We note in passing that the American edition has a bizarre illustration on the cover, pictured right. There are much better historical novels, and it is sad to see such a great story thus mutilated.

If you want excellent story-telling that brings ancient Greece to life read Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire. If you want magnificent non-fiction with insight into the ancient Greek sense of life, read Bowra's The Greek Experience. 

Without attempting to overdo the drama of the difficulty of writing, to be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment, with an accompanying intense wish that one worked instead at bricklaying. [Joseph Epstein, NYT] 

Do you trust the media? Apparently it fell into the category "too good to check." Last Friday, several British newspapers reported that the World Health Organization had found in a study that blonds would become extinct within 200 years, because blondness was caused by a recessive gene that was dying out. The reports were repeated on Friday by anchors for the ABC News program "Good Morning America," and on Saturday by CNN. There was only one problem, the health organization said in a statement yesterday that it never reported that blonds would become extinct, and it had never done a study on the subject. [NYT] 

Satellite observations for the 20-year period 1979-1998 have been used to analyze trends in Antarctic sea ice extent and sea ice area. Both measurements have been found to be increasing by about 1% per decade for the Southern Ocean. The observed increase in Antarctic sea ice area and extent over the past twenty years is consistent with the concomitant temperature decrease observed over earth's vast southern continent... These facts contradict all models and predictions of CO2-induced global warming. [Journal of Geophysical Research via CO2 Science Magazine] 

One percent of the bugs in Microsoft's software cause half of all reported errors with 20 percent of bugs responsible for 80 percent of the mistakes [sic] ... says Steve Ballmer, claiming to be surprised. [Forbes] The real surprise is that Microsoft is only now measuring and reporting this. The other surprise is claiming that bugs cause "mistakes" as if end-users are somehow mistaken when MS software is buggy. The positive side is the very public statement, and the resolve to track bug reports and let people see what is happening. As I've said before, all companies will ultimately track their issues, bugs, and fixes in public (all companies, not just software developers). Already, Radio UserLand has a public forum for questions and informal bug reports, and an RSS feed to document updates/fixes. Mozilla has bugzilla, a public bug database.

Update: the NYT has an article on Microsoft's recent bug-tracking efforts: their new "Watson" system reports and then transmits to Microsoft real-world data about customer crashes.