Why I Write Software

One of my earliest memories:

It's a hot sunny afternoon and I'm sitting on the ground in our driveway. My dad is sitting next to me, his hands covered with grease, showing me parts from a '58 Aston Martin he's working on. I'm asking him questions. "What's that?" "What does it do?" I want him to explain cars to me in terms I can understand at 5 years old. He does.

I began writing software because it was the most satisfying thing I could do. It was more fun than carpentry or machining or electronics because I could make bigger, more complicated things faster and try them out right away.

The summer of my junior year in college a San Francisco company tried to recruit me out of school. "You don't have to wear a tie," I was told, "but you have to wear shoes. We're in banking, after all." That was when I realized I could make a living at it.

Years later I discovered another benefit.

A google search this morning for "+abajian +sputnik +repeat" returns over 800 hits, most of which are citations. A program that I wrote in my first month at the UW MBT lab seven years ago is still in use by molecular biologists today in hundreds, perhaps thousands of labs around the world (judging by the email). It's deeply satisfying to know that I've contributed to so many research projects. I try to think about that when it seems like all I do is go to meetings, or the code is getting the best of me.

I'm very fortunate to have made a career of something I love.

Open Source Democracy (NOT)

 
OK, This probably isn't as bad as it sounds, but really. Email from redhat this morning:

Some or all of your votes have been removed from bug 433649.

You had 50 votes on this bug, but 50 have been removed.

You have no more votes remaining on this bug.

Reason:
The rules for voting on this product has changed; you had
too many total votes, so all votes have been removed.

 

Magic NAT Incantation

 

How many times am I going to get bit with this?

Rebuilt the system this weekend. In addition to the expected hassles of version upgrades, aging hardware and the peculiarities of my configuration there's always one or two things I forget that cause some unnecessary stress. But this one gets me every single time.

No matter what I did, I couldn't get NAT to work. The machines on the subnet were pingable, had happy network connections. But no outside internet. I could resolve domains using my local internal cacheing nameserver but could not reach those hosts.

I spent hours staring at the iptables file, starting and stopping the network, checking cables, rebooting machines on the subnet. No packets, no joy. Finally I'm sitting at a party on Saturday night, drinking some deadly home-made liqueur (started as vodka, involved lemons) when suddenly I have a flashback to more than ten years ago, sitting in an office trying to get NAT to work. A vision appeared in my mind and a blazing hand descended from heaven to write this message across the sky in burning letters:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

No, I will never learn. The only hope is write as much stuff down as possible for next time. Or maybe I should just accept the fact that my faculties have deteriorated past the point of being a small-time linux admin. Can I still get an account at AOL?

 

The word you're looking for is "hubris."

 

Christopher Buckley's story about the death of his parents (NY Times Magazine, "Growing Up Buckley," April 26, 2009) was funny and sad but in the end it's just another account of the tragic lives of the rich and famous. It's better written than a typical tabloid piece but fundamentally there's nothing more interesting about this dysfunctional family than a million others. The audience appeal is in the juicy details. Was the service really held at St. Patrick's Cathedral? Where was the reception? Who was there? We want (more) names.

That's not the problem I have with the piece. I don't give a rat's ass whether they spent Christmas in the Caribbean or Atlantic City. The offensive part comes at the end, when we're treated to one more salacious, circulation-boosting detail concerning his father's involvement in Watergate and how deeply it troubled him. Hunt and Nixon were involved in serious crimes, crimes that precipitated a constitutional crisis. If true this story makes William F. Buckley an accessory. Ironic or no, the reference to Gethsemane turned my stomach. Are we supposed to see his father's silence as virtuous? To forgive him because he later became friends with one of the victims? Because he's rich and famous?

It's not hard to see a direct connection between the failure to prosecute Richard Nixon's crimes and our situation today, where the members of the same pundit class of which William Buckley was for many years a leading voice dismiss calls for prosecution of the Bush administration for public violations of domestic and international law (and generally shredding the constitution) on the grounds that it represents an "unworthy desire for vengeance." They reveal an unspoken but widely held belief that men and women of high stature, wealth and power are inherently noble and so above the law. The consequences for the rest of us are severe.

In case Christopher Buckley thinks this is all just petty class resentment, let me call this unspoken belief by another name: hubris. Maybe he'll take it more seriously if I say it in Greek.