Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Los Angeles is the best helicopter town in the United States.  Distances are vast, traffic is beyond human tolerance, people are rich, helipads are everywhere, the weather is perfect, and the population is accustomed to 24/7 noise from various kinds of machines.

My helicopter week in LA started with the Robinson Helicopter Factory Safety Course.  Every two weeks, roughly 100 people flock to Torrance, California for this 3.5-day course, most of which is classroom instruction.  The most important thing for a non-pilot to take away from a course such as this is “Don’t walk anywhere near the tail of a helicopter, where the tail rotor can chop off your limbs or head.”  People should approach running helicopters from the front, depart by backing away from the front, and keep eye contact with the pilot.

After completing the course, I went down to the John Wayne airport (KSNA) in Orange County for an introductory lesson with Helistream, reputedly one of the best helicopter schools in the U.S.  Helistream does a lot of recurrent training for experienced police department pilots, but they also provide training for beginners such as myself.  Helistream is situated on the roof of a medium-sized office building adjacent t the airport.  Part of the roof is devoted to their hangar, and part devoted to a helipad large enough for about three ships.  Andreas, the chief instructor, and I, flew up into the hills and landed in a clearing.  Then we came back to the airport for “full touch-down” autorotations.  This is a required maneuver for helicopter flight instructors.  Starting about 500′ above the ground, you roll the throttle down to idle and let the helicopter glide until it is about 40′ off the ground.  Then you start to pull back on the cyclic to flare the helicopter and turn its forward airspeed into an arresting of the descent rate.  Finally, you pull the collective pitch control to cushion the final contact with the ground, which in our case was the hard asphalt surface of an airplane runway.  Even with an experienced pilot, in a light helicopter such as the Robinson R22, there will be an inevitable amount of sliding and scraping along the ground at the end.  Full-downs used to be required for all helicopter pilots, but the FAA and the manufacturers have been discouraging their use in training.  Very few helicopters get wrecked due to engine failure; quite a few were getting destroyed during practice autorotations.

The John Wayne tower eventually got too busy to deal with us, so we flew down the coast to Laguna Beach, 500′ above the surf.  There is no industry in this portion of the coast, just private houses that look like fancy hotels and fancy hotels that look like small towns unto themselves.

We landed in the dark, refueled, and then had to restart the helicopter and park it back on top of the building.  This would not have been easy for a student working on his private pilot’s license!

I ended my week flying Commander Chuck Street’s Bell Jet Ranger out of Fullerton.  From 6:00 am until 9:00 am, we watched the aftermaths of cars burning, a “vagrant/homeless person” getting struck and killed under a bridge, fatal collisions, and saw literally hundreds of thousands of people backed up for 30-90 extra minutes behind these various accidents.  Chuck worked the radios as we transitioned among LA’s complex airspaces, made on-air reports, and had me do various practice approaches and landings to hilltop pads, small airports, and various spots on the Fullerton airport.

The waste of resources viewed from the air was almost as tragic as the deaths that are a daily feature of folks trying to get around LA.  LA has a highway and surface road infrastructure worth hundreds of billions of dollars.  The cars on these highways are probably worth another $100 billion.  Yet for want of a few GPS chips and a wireless Internet system that would allow the cars to talk to each other, there is no way for a car to tell the driver “don’t go this route because you’ll just end up waiting for 90 minutes behind a clumb of other stuck cars.”

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When an average person is charitably inclined, the objects of that charitable impulse are most likely to be local.  The local opera company gets a big check.  Hurricane victims in a far-away corner of the nation, though their need is larger, get a smaller check.  Unfortunates in distant countries get almost nothing.  Government policies seem to reflect the will of the average person.  Lots of money is spent on domestic programs, helping the people we know and see every day; comparatively little is spent on foreign aid.

For American computer nerds, this relationship is reversed.  Bill Gates gets rich.  His thoughts turn to malaria, AIDS, and going over to Africa to try to hold back the tide of these diseases.  The Google founders are talking about their foundation concentrating on Africa and they just bought a personal Boeing 767 to make it easy to get back and forth.  A visit to www.itconversations.com reveals that when techie movers and shakers gather, e.g., at Poptech, they talk about how they are going to fix Africa.  Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab, decided that his next act would be the $100 laptop for children in Third World countries.

How to explain this difference?  Perhaps the average person has a lot of emotional ties and uses these to guide his or her giving.  Whereas the computer nerd has mostly been isolated from other humans in his or her community.  When the time to do something charitable, he does a Web search for “unfortunate losers” and finds out that there are lots more in Africa than in Seattle or the Bay Area.  If you have no personal connections and the people to be helped are mostly just statistics, it is just as satisfying to help people far away as geographically close.  When the people far away are in worse shape than the people nearby, it becomes more satisfying to help them.

[The folks who’ve actually spent time in Africa feel a lot less sorry for Africans.  One fellow at the Hacker’s Conference spent nearly a year on a road trip through Africa with www.dragoman.com.  He said “In a lot of the villages where we stayed, folks only have to work about two months per year to pay for all of their food and shelter.  They’re so much happier than Americans.”  My friend who work in public health and have spent years in Tanzania don’t shed tears for the locals, either.  And there is some evidence that Africans may not be as bad off economically as the dry statistics suggest.  http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/gear/2005-10-16-africa-cellular_x.htm notes that “an estimated 100 million of [Africa’s] 906 million people” have mobile phones.]

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Five years ago I wrote http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/professionalism-for-software-engineers.  At the time I was unhappy that most programmers did not seem to have an investment in the user experience.  How have things changed?  I was chatting with three distinguished software engineers from Silicon Valley.  We were talking about phones.  I mentioned that my Windows XP Mobile phone (Motorola MPx220) exhibits an annoying behavior:

• you are talking on the phone
  
• a call waiting beep interrupts the call
  
• you press the soft key to reject the incoming call
  
• almost invariably the rejected caller leaves a voicemail
  
• you continue talking
  
• the phone vibrates to let you know that a new voicemail is available
  
• the vibration of the phone, amplified through the microphone, makes the person you’re talking to think that you were just crushed in an earthquake

I cited this as an example of programmers who needed to do better by their users.  Silicon Valley’s finest disagreed.  The specs were drafted by a marketing person, they argued.  The specs said “vibrate when a new voicemail is available” not “unless the consumer is on a call.”  The programmer was responsible for doing what he was told by management, no more and no less.

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I’ve been talking to various folks in California for a week about http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-computer .  The reaction is almost entirely predictable based on the listener’s level of technical expertise.  “Nobody will ever want that,” says the typical 50-year-old Silicon Valley veteran.  “I would buy that right now.  My Microsoft PocketPC Phone already does everything that I want and need.  I just want a bigger screen and keyboard,” says a corporate lawyer (he charges about $600 per hour and presumably can buy whatever he wants).  The teenage girls in the hotel hot tub, one of whom was actually talking on a cell phone while in the tub, were enthusiastic about the idea.  Setting up and maintaining a home PC was for the losers and geeks.

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Some interesting things that I learned about at the Hacker’s Conference that either are or have Web sites:

• http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html and http://www.googleguide.com/help/calculator.html
  
• http://www.nw.com/nw/projects/cubatron/
  
• http://www.dataplace.org/
  
• http://www.ergodex.com/ (arbitrarily configurable keyboard; intended for gamers but lots of other creative uses; Windows-only)
  
• http://www.ageia.com/ (physics accelerator for video games; Windows/PC only)
  
• http://mappoint.msn.com/directionsfind.aspx (select the “LineDrive” format and watch in awe as Microsoft draws you a schematic map to your destination, with the uninteresting long freeway sections compressed and the complex local neighborhood sections in detail, all black and white for easy printing, proof that not everything interesting is happening at Google)

Enjoy!

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My cousin Douglas is blessed with two young daughters, a wonderfully warm wife, and a 21-year-old au pair from Brazil named Sabrina (photo).  Sabrina spent three years at university in Brazil before coming to the U.S., but she studied business rather than English.  The result has been some rather surprising conversations.

“Doggie, I need a ride to [English language] school,” Sabrina said one morning.

Once Doug and Sabrina were alone in the car, Sabrina mentioned that she wanted to talk about her thesis.

“Doggie, I need to fok.”

“Excuse me,” my cousin replied.  “Could you say that again?”

“I need to fok.”

They went back and forth for awhile until Doug remembered that Sabrina had a habit of dropping the last syllable of a word.

“Do you mean to say ‘I need to focus’?” Doug asked.

“Yes!  Exactly.  I need to focus.”

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Suppose that a hedge fund promises to return, say 20 percent annually, regardless of whether the market goes up or down.  There are lots of such funds that promise big returns without too much risk.  Now consider the situation of the managers of General Electric. As of October 29, 2005, finance.yahoo.com shows that GE has a return on equity of 17.62 percent annually. If the managers of GE believe the claims of the hedge fund managers, wouldn’t the best thing that they could do for GE shareholders be to sell all of GE’s businesses and put the money into the hedge fund returning a risk-free 20 percent? Even Microsoft only shows a 12.6 percent return on assets and 19.93 percent return on equity. Only Google, the world’s fastest company to reach $1 billion in revenue, beats the hedge fund geniuses, with a return on equity of 22.8 percent.

What am I missing?  Why don’t most big companies sell all of their business units and put the $$ into hedge funds?

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My cousin got tickets for a lecture by Stephen Hawking at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre last Thursday night.  The venue is gorgeous, by the way, and anyone visiting the Bay Area should try to attend at least one performance here.  The 3000 seats were just about sold out.  The lecture began with a gushy woman from a local science museum thanking the sponsors.  This struck me as odd because, at almost $100 per ticket, the audience had paid more than $200,000 to attend.  Even in an era of cosmic inflation, I couldn’t figure out how $200k wouldn’t cover expenses.  Hawking was wheeled out on stage after this intro.  He controls the sequence of text strings being fed into a speech synthesizer via eye blinks.  Unlike at most computer nerd conferences, there was no TV camera pointed at Hawking and no projection of his face, so folks sitting more than a few rows back couldn’t really see what he was doing.  Hawking’s lecture was a 45-minute explanation of Cosmology with PowerPoint slides and was very sketchy.  If you had not read a book such as Simon Singh’s brilliant and clear Big Bang recently, you’d have learned almost nothing.

The question and answer period at the end was a little more interesting.  Hawking selected from previous interview questions for which he had already laboriously prepared answers.  His favorite show on American television is the Simpsons.  He hates George W. Bush for (1) wanting to send humans to Mars, and (2) wanting to limit Federal funding for research on new stem cell lines.  I thought that this hatred for W. was odd.  There are a lot of wasteful things that the government does, and few of them are as much fun as a mission to Mars (I hope that they send old adventurous private citizens rather than government employees whose death will plunge us all into mourning).  The anger over the stem cell funding debacle made even less sense, being so far outside of Hawking’s research area (you could argue that it is within his personal area, given that he suffers from ALS, but (a) Hawking is very old and basic research is unlikely to prove helpful within his lifetime, and (b) scientists pride themselves on being dispassionate).

Let’s review the reality of stem cell research funding in the U.S.  The Federales won’t fund research on new stem cell lines, only on old ones.  This leaves folks who want to work on new lines with the following options:  (1) a $3 billion fund established by the State of Caliornia for stem cell research; (2) the $billions in private biomedical research funding from foundations such as Howard Hughes Medical Institute; (3) the $billions in private biomedical research and development funding from drug companies such as Merck.  If working on stem cells is an automatic path to results and glory for researchers and funders, it would seem that quite a bit of money is available.  Why then get so angry with W. for having an opinion?

One possible explanation:  Solidarity with other scientists against laypeople.  The idea that a layperson could have an opinion and interfere with scientific funding decisions is anathema to a fraternity of scientists.  Today the boneheads, lacking even a basic Ph.D., are questioning the need for research on new stem cell lines.  Maybe tomorrow they will start questioning whether it is wise to spend $100 billion on a new accelerator to study inflaton particles.

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One of the things that I did down in Silicon Valley was attend a lecture by Alan Cooper, notable for his authorship of the book About Face in 1995 and his criticism of exposing the hierarchical file system and the RAM/disk distinction to end-users.  Cooper’s latest project is “ending the death march”, figuring out how to fix the chronically broken process of software development.  Cooper starts from the proposition that software development projects are opaque to management, generally failures, and therefore management underfunds and understaffs them, hoping that, if failure is inevitable, at least it will be a cheaper failure.

Cooper wants to see interaction design, the software’s behavior, made more explicit in the design.  He notes that he has met two kinds of programmers in this world: (1) those who like to get stuff right, and (2) those who like to ship product and get it into users’ hands.  His proposal is “the Triad” in which three kinds of people are given equal status on the project:  Interaction Designers, Design Engineers, and Production Programmers.  The design engineers figure out how to get state of the art technology and algorithms into the product and they may write a lot of test code that will eventually be chucked.  The production programmers handle all of the edge cases and compatibility/installation/deinstallation concerns.  He presented a lot of graphs for CEO-types about measuring return on investment at various stages.  I didn’t understand these.

I personally enjoyed seeing Cooper’s elevation of interaction design.  In the course that we teach at MIT, we try to hammer into students the importance of planning the data model (what can be represented in between clicks and sessions) and page flow (the interaction design itself) before writing the pages.  For all too many systems, the interaction design is only specified implicitly in a huge pile of CGI scripts or whatever.

The question for commenters is “Do we believe that changing the management process can fix software development?”

Let’s look at some potential arguments against Cooper’s proposal.

First, it is unclear that the average software project is underfunded or understaffed.  The U.S. govenrment regularly throws $billions at seemingly fairly simple software projects that a handful of expert programmers ought to be able to do by themselves.  A typical project has lots of mediocre programmers on it whose contributions are negative.  In this sense, the project is clearly overstaffed because it would go faster if you fired 50 percent of the people.

Second, the fundamental tools and debuggers for software have changed but little in 50 years.  During that time, many tens of thousands of organizations have executed software development projects.  Among these tens of thousands of organizations, every conceivable management structure has already been tried.  If there were a silver bullet, it would already have been discovered by one of these companies, perhaps randomly, and then propagated to the world at large.

Third, when genuine progress has been made in software development productivity and software quality, it has come from improved tools such as SQL (a declarative language that replaced a lot of unreliable and unreadable imperative code).  Maybe the reason software development projects fail is that we’re using the same tools, the programmers have the same IQ as in decades past (or perhaps lower as the smart ones trot off to professional schools), and the requirements have become more complex.

Fourth, when you see a company whose products are better than competitors, it is usually because they have programmers with higher IQs, not a magic management technique.  Google has the smart people; the federal government (and its contractors) has the dullards.  Google gets innovative stuff out on time; the federal government ends up years behind schedule on a simple rewrite.

Fifth, over the life cycle of a software product, we already almost have the kind of structure and division of labor proposed by Cooper.  The programmers who like blazing new trails, albeit somewhat sloppily, show up on Day 1.  They solve the hardest algorithm problems and get a working v1.0 out the door.  By the time v3.0 is shipped, natural turnover within the development group has resulted in the code being worked on only by production programmers who like methodically sweating the details.

Some arguments in favor of Cooper’s proposal:

Managers of software development projects tend to be so incompetent and lacking in information that they can’t recognize and reward the strong contributors (this results in the best programmers getting paid only 20-30 percent more than the mediocre ones (compared to a 500 percent ratio in most areas of law, for example)).

Making the interaction design explicit makes it easy for decision-makers to evaluate whether programmers are accomplishing anything.

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A few random quotes from Californians…

“The state of software is such that we now have toilets that understand when a person is standing in front of them, but not computers.” [computer-human interaction expert]

“McAfee Coliseum” [sign on the enormous baseball stadium in Oakland; there are so many security holes in Microsoft Windows that you can earn enough money to sponsor a stadium by attempting to paper over the C programmers’ bugs]

“I picked the navigation system that I liked and then bought the car that came with it.” [computer-human interaction expert; car turns out to have been the Acura RL]

“The avocados are from the front yard; I just picked them up from the driveway.  We have another 100 in the garage if you want some.  The orange juice is from the back yard tree.” [Nobel Prize winning physicist and suburban farmer in Palo Alto]

“We could have airline service and even 747s on the 10,000′ runway at Moffett (old military field in Mountain View; very lightly used by the government now), but the City of San Jose spends a fortune lobbying against it so they can continue to collect fees at the San Jose airport.” [Flight instructor at the Palo Alto airport.]

“I’m going out to a company party.  Unfortunately most of the people there will be programmers.  They’re just the dullest people in the world.  It is even worse because I’m a woman and they are afraid to talk to women…. I hope that you’re not a programmer.” [Software marketing executive sitting next to me on American Airlines.]

Last night:  Good night and good luck with my friend Toby (aged 76, so she lived through the era).  We both enjoyed it.

Tonight:  Some sort of multi-media lecture by Stephen Hawking at Oakland’s Paramount Theater (my cousin got the tickets).

Tomorrow:  Hacker’s Conference in Santa Cruz.

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