Nerdery With Dru

It has been a struggle, because the politics at both ends of the spectrum are a mess, and quite frankly, terrifying.

The left has completely and utterly lost their ever loving ( and I mean that literally ) minds. Love is truly love, and I fully support gay marriage and gay partner rights. I fully support gender identity choices in how a person lives their lives. Their pronouns are theirs, and there should be no issue with this. However, tansgender athletics is nonsense, because a year of hormone therapy, and a current hormone number that meets ‘gender normal’ does not overcome or offset a decade or more of body adaptations with cross gender normal numbers. Meaning, a birth gender male, once choosing to adopt a female gender identity, should not qualify to compete against birth gendered females. Of course, there are other things, climate change, COVID vaccines, and of course, abortion as a contraceptive ( yeah, I know all of the arguments, I am pro-choice, or more specifically, that as a male, I have ZERO say in the matter ).

The right however, has gone every bit as overboard, and borderline religious extremist, as in ‘they will not admit it, but they are pushing ‘Taliban’ levels of religious based intolerance’. The level of fear mongering and hateful rhetoric coming from the right is terrifying, and DEEPLY anti-democracy, anti-religious freedoms, anti-free speech, all while actively trying to protect their own rights and civil liberties. So much is being made about corporations choosing to embrace inclusivity that the right is raging against, and yet, this inclusivity should be both a priority ( if they in fact believe in the Christian teachings of love and inclusivity ) and a financial obligation ( as a deeply pro-business party line ), and yet, because of some bizarre perspective on the immorality of a version of love they choose not to embrace, while that version of love has NO DIRECT IMPACT upon them, the instead cling to the ideas that those ‘others’ are ‘grooming’ their children. ( For what it is worth, if you want to talk about ‘grooming’ can we discuss the impacts of toy guns, toy cars, toy trucks, GI Joe, HALO, and Gran Tourismo along with the driving and lifestyle choices including drug use, alcohol abuse, adultery, pornography, physical abuse, emotional abuse and divorce that are all rampant throughout both spectrums, particularly at the fringes? )

None of this even begins to address the elephant in the room that is the “Boomer” generation and it’s political disingenuous behaviors where they vote to protect their own lifestyles in full knowledge and awareness that those choices are almost certainly resulting in enormous liabilities for the children that should have benefited from the generational wealth they should leave, as their own parents did for them, and yet due to these protectionist choices will bear an undue burden.

I will be honest, this post is going to cost me some long term connections. Many of whom I respect, and truly like. It will also trigger some argumentative positions that will want to defend their views. It is for these reasons that I have avoided these topics. I have too many dear friends, whom I respect deeply, that have in many ways sublimated the extreme right or left into their personal identities ( much as my gender dysphoria friends have with their own gender identities ). Many of these friends will take offense, either on political or religious grounds ( several of whom, I have offended in the past with my own deeply anti organized religion, ‘Church’, comments in the past, because while I believe that faith and belief have a purpose and place in a moral society, Churches too often twist those things into little more than power and manipulation of a community ).

So, at the end of the day, I post this because I have grown incredibly tired of the bullshit ‘silent majority’.

The ‘silent majority’ is the centrist population that is fed up with the Republicans and the Democrats. Fed up with the IRS, Fox News, and CNN. Fed up with the lies, misinformation and the outright deceit practiced by the media, advertisers and political lobbyists. We want good candidates, people that are not outright crooks like the Clintons or Trump ( and if you ask me, the Clintons have a more crooked history than Trump, which is saying something... ). The problem is, when we get ‘moderate’ candidates on the table, it is the literal definition of ‘good because not awful’ that is the Biden result.

At some point, right, left, center, straight, gay, other, religious or atheist, it falls on us, each and everyone of us, to reject the extremes, reject hate, and divisiveness, and demand love, honor, respect, and competence in ourselves, our elected officials and our churches.

“I am exhausted. Not physically, but emotionally and mentally wiped out.

I am not supposed to say that out loud. I am a man, a husband, a father, an employee, an employer, a provider, a son, a sibling, and more roles. I am supposed to be a stable rock for others to lean on. I am expected to be the bread winner, the provider, the handy man, the lawn guy, the car guy, the pool guy, and generally there to handle the issues that crop up in a household.

Somewhere along the way, in addition to those roles, I am also now expected to be the chauffeur, the maid, the personal cook, the meal planner and preparer, the grocery getter, the personal shopper, the ear to talk at, and the shoulder to lean on.

Bear in mind, those in my household, they have little to no interest in my wants and needs. They have expectations of me, but give little to no effort to even know where I am at. Children, spouses, extended family, etc, they rarely have moments to consider what I need, and certainly zero interest in accomplishing the things that they have been asked to do, unless there is a deep self interest in doing them.”

Sadly, this is not an atypical story. In conversations with many of my friends, family, acquaintances. Married, recently divorced, and more, so very many people relate to me minor variations of this recurring theme. 

“The harder I work to be the best husband, father and family man, the less those I am working for appreciated what I do.”

It is terrifying to me, just how prevalent and recurring these themes are. Worse, it is not just the men. I hear the same themes from the women that I meet that are willing to discuss it.

IF it so common, why isn’t it discussed more in public? I think it is because we have been led to believe that discussing these issues only makes things worse, because it can lead to animosity, hostility or even false interest and support.

Sadly, I do not see a solution, because the people that feel neglected see no recourse ( except to seek that attention elsewhere ), or to just suck it up, and those that are on the other side, have no awareness that there is a problem, right up until the person that is suffering breaks, and then it ‘came out of nowhere’.

Web development on the Mac is a great. Many browser options, some really fantastic tools, and an environment that is well sutied to the web workflow. Safari, in its efforts to be the fastest however makes some things a little more painful for developers. One of those is how it handles reloading web pages. As a developer, we are constantly changing little things in web pages to get them quite right. But since Safari tries so hard NOT to reload content unless it has to, many times it will not pick up changes unless you do a forced reload, which just hitting the refresh button won’t do, nor does the Command+R Force Reload option. In order to do it, you have to navigate into the menus, empty the cache and then force reload the page. Kind of a pain in the arse, and I am lazy. So. I give you an AppleScript ( you will need to allow Script Editor to control your computer for it to work ).

It is a strange turn for me. After 20 years of using primarily Macs and iOS devices, I find that my preferred portable device is a Windows machine. The last time I carried a Windows machine as my primary portable device, Windows 2000 was the operating system, and it was a Dell laptop with 2 PCMCIA ports. Unplugged, 60 minutes would have been a light usage day, and at the time, it was a beast.

Then I switched ( unintentionally ) to an Apple iBook. I picked up an iBook to play with OS X and see what they were doing. A few months later, that little, underpowered, but well designed laptop supplanted that Dell laptop. Since then, I've been through many laptops. I've had iPads, I've had Windows tablet, and none, to date have been able to become the device that I reach for first as my mobile device.

The Surface Pro X has become that device in the last few weeks. Like that iBook all those years ago, it really is not best of breed at anything, but it is better than average at almost everything. The items that keep my iPad in the bag are the books I have on it, and a couple of tools that just don't work on the Surface Pro X yet, if ever

Being a Windows ARM device means there are a handful of compromises in place that can make software choices tricky.

ZWIFT

One of the fitness tools that I use in my life, is simply a non-starter on the Surface Pro X. Built on .NET, and the Unity game engine, most of the platform should be portable, and they do run the same code on iPadOS, iOS, tvOS, Windows and MacOS X, so in theory it should be no problem. Sadly, as they've elected to adopt 64bit only on Windows, and the engine uses OpenGL rather than DirectX on Windows, not only will it not run in x86 emulation, it cannot be corss compiled to ARM64 as Windows on ARM does not support OpenGL.

Embarcadero Delphi

... Often turns out to be. When a developer writes code long enough, they will run into a development pattern that will lead to the dreaded unintended consequences, and the many lost hours to tracking down the how and why. Unfortunately, this also often leads to the other programmer problem, the complicated problems have complicated solutions, when in fact, the problem was simple, but the lost hours made it feel complicated, and the solution is likewise far simpler than it seemed.

I trapped myself in one of these this week, and I figure I will share in the hopes that someone else can learn from my series of mistakes that led me to a frustrating weekend and a couple of missed bike rides, because I got mired in the hunt for the problem.

There is a program that I maintain for customers that is essentially the heart of their businesses. When it hiccups, they get frustrated, and rightly so. Making changes in that code is usually not a big deal, as the codebase really is not overly complex on the surface. However, there are some things under the surface that are a bit more hairy. Many years ago, it moved from a model where most of the code existed within the user interface to a more modern model view controller design ( this is code that has been evolving since the early 90's and has its roots in 16-bit Windows ).

The business object layer is where most of the brains are, and the user experience is largely a thin veneer over them. I am the core maintainer of the business object layer, and because of the history with them, I am also the one that knows where most of the skeletons are within that code. So when things go wrong, things escalate back to me when others cannot find the problem reasonably quickly.

This was one of those problems.

The Problem

The original support ticket on this issue is now months old. It started like so many do: "The program randomly encounters an error and stops running. The error message was that a list index is out of bounds". Unfortunately, this information is not enough to create a reproduceable bug, so difficult to trace. Slowly, over the ensuing weeks, a few more reports come in. There is definitely a problem, but not much pattern to find it. So the hunt begins. What changed in the last release prior to the first reports? Changelog doesn't show anything that should be of significance. Most everything is enhancements. Nothing that should touch lists. Go back a a few revisions. Still nothing.

Time passes. More error reports come in, but still nothing reliably reproduceable.

Each time the error reports come in. Spend a couple of hours digging at it, but still nothing.

Another report comes in, and this has been escalated. Now it's MY problem. Spend a morning digging, literally randomly clicking between a couple of UX elements that are the most likely candidates. To tab pages with list views on them. An hour of clicking produces a few errors, but the debugger drops into Windows runtime assembler, not user space code. Cookies, M&Ms and Diet Coke acquired, office door closed, music cranked up, phone on Do Not Disturb. It is on. This bug is going down. More clicking and finally a reproduceable pattern is identified.. Select an item in a list view on tab page A. Switch to tab page B. Select an item in the list on that page. Switch back to tab page A and boom the error occurs and dumps into Window runtime land, with no reference in the stack to user space code.

With a pattern in hand, now it is time to figure out the reasons. Back to the changelogs to figure out when a change occurred that impact these user interface elements. 6 months prior, a change was made to improve performance of several list views, including one of these. However, that change had been in deployment for3 months before the first error report came in. It can't be the problem can it?

More digging and refining the test case that triggers the failure. Hours pass. Frustration sets in. Resort to calling a colleague in to just listen while I talk through it. Somewhere in the middle of that conversation, the answer hits like a lightning bolt. It is is a problem with the 6 month old performance change, but was only exposed by a months later tangential change that should have had no effect on the lists, at least on the surface.

Unintended, Unplanned for, and Unexpected Consequences

It turns out that the root of the problem was a premature optimization decision made several years prior. The relevant code comments point to the author ( me ), and a date of 2015. Evolution of code and responding to customer requests often creates these very situations.

The user interface element at the heart of this issue is a list of notes pertaining to the document currently open. As any developer who has worked with customer service type operations can reiterate, notes are the lifeblood of the operation. The constant customer requests mean that they end up expanding, and needing to be displayed like Chicago voting, early, often and everywhere. Because of this, there is a heavy reuse of the same user interface element to display these notes wherever needed.

The performance change months ago was to switch the lists from a traditional listview/listitem model to a listview/virtual list model operating directly against the business object store representing the array of notes. Everything worked fine, until a single, subtle change was made months later. One instance of the reusable notes user interface element had the option to have user filters applied to the list enabled. Since all of these reused display elements shared a common data store in the business logic, filters applied in one space applied across all of them, since they were all sharing a single instance of the business object. This was fine so long as there was never any potential overlap of having two of these instances visible at the same time, or, as it turns out switching directly between two of them.

Results

As I am sure the more experienced developers have already deduced, when one list was being swapped out, with the other, there was a brief period where it was possible (though not always true) that the state of the data store was inconsistent with the expected content of the displayable lists, the result, seemingly random failures to read a memory address that was no longer valid.

How Did We Get Here?

Honestly, it was a failure to communicate the risks. I wrote the code initially many moons ago. I authored the performance improvements, and then I approved the recent change in passing, without taking the time to fully consider the ramifications, which I am reasonably certain I would have caught given the chance to actually think about them, but in the press of a customer request while I was focused on another pressing task, I did not take the time to do so. Then to make matters worse, the situation was one that the unit test test cases would never have trapped as they existed at that point.

The Solution, and Not the Solution, and then the Solution

All of this leads to the other developer problem and disconnect in the how we think. In typical fashion, the immediate conclusion is that a hard to find problem, does not have an easy solution. So, a solution is formulated, planned implemented and enters testing. It works, but it is expensive in terms of resources. It creates separate copies of the data store per reused list view. It is a hammer, when really all that is needed is a gentle nudge.

Sometime after starting testing, the developer, who has at this point left to do something else because decompression is needed, has the "oh shit" moment. Yeah, brute force works, but is fundamentally flawed in the wasted resources, as well as user experience. Worse the business object layer already supports what is needed.

Instead of creating copies of the underlying datastore, all that is needed is to maintain multiple filtered lists that reference the allocated objects in the underlying data store. It is a 5 minute change involving about 3 lines of code ( and 30 lines of documentation to explain what is happening ). Dump it into the testing rig, and add a new test case to handle this unique tests.

Side Note

With Microsoft moving Edge to Chromium, the web as we know is dead. Well, dying is more like it. Essentially, this move means that We will have several Chromium based browsers, all catering to Google's desires, Firefox and Safari. Safari is close to Chromium as both have deep roots in WebKit. Firefox keeps doing it's own thing.

Some people say this is a win for standards based web. I say this:

Microsoft is going down an curious path with Windows on ARM. This is not the first time that they've worked with non-x86 hardware, nor is it the first time they have attempted win32 emulation on non-x86 hardware. Way back in the Windows NT 3.51 days, we had Windows NT running on DEC Alpha AXP hardware, complete with x86 emulation for Win32 apps. It was technology that worked, but it was a little slow and had some limitations. In the intervening years, emulation and has come a long long way, and some of the current ARM hardware has far suprassed the hardware of that era.

The question is, can Windows on ARM perform well enough with non-native apps, that the devices can proliferate wide enough to justify 3rd parties investing in native code outside o the Universal Windows Platorm. In my day job, I support a suite of Windows apps that are very wedded to Win32, but I have customers that are very interested in the form and battery life ARM offers. With that in mind, I have taken delivery of an HP Envy ARM tablet that I will be trying to live with as one of my Windows environments for the next couple of months.

Having spent this afternoon getting it configured to run the custom apps, I find that it works far better than I predicted, which is a huge start. Next up comes the work of setting the machine up as a working device for me, with not only the tools I support, but the tools that I use to do that support.

For the last several months we have been working on a project to replace much of the existing website, and to integrate in some other ideas and features. Along the way, we found that we really wanted something that fit our model a little better than the pretty standard tools. What started as an experiment to see if it could be done effectively, grew.

The result is a framework, implemented entirely in Swift to make it relatively easy to write CGI apps using Swift.

The Apple HomePod represents such a question mark for the industry. This is not the first time that Apple has been late to a market, with a product that on the surface offers functionality matched by several other players, with a product that hits a high price point, with a product that just doesn't resonate with press, with a product that simply doesn't have a clear target market to the majority outside of the walls at Apple.

The last time this happened, it was a little product called the iPod. Some might argue that the iPhone fits the mark, but I would propose that the iPhone was an obvious evolution from the iPod, while the iPod itself was hitting a market that was arguably saturated.

The HomePod looks like a similiar launch. The press clearly doesn't see where it fits, and most of the comparisons are against products like the Amazon Alexa family or the Google Assistant based speakers, and even the Sonos wireless speakers. All of these products offer lower price points, and sthe first two offer uperior functionality as a personal assistant. They've all been in the market longer and offer some things that Apple will not offer out of the gate, and honestly, due to philosophical differences in business model, may never offer.

There is a fundamental flaw in the early pundit and press commentary, and it is that they are right, but they are missing the other bits that may well be the undoing of a market. Again.

Looking at the marketing materials, looking at the design and implementation details, it is easy to see personal assistant and hang on the Siri integration, and miss the more subtle details.

The more the marketing material gets broken down, it looks more and more like the HomePod is, first and foremost about music, and competes more directly against products like the Bose Wave systems than against the Alexa style devices. In that context, the price point is actually very competitive. Now, the HomePod in that context may represent more of a Trojan Horse though, because along with it comes the HomeKit anchor that Apple has been trying to establish with the Apple TV. And then of course, it also support Siri, which eases the control issues that plauge other 'Smart' devices, so while music is the compelling purchase reason, the hook is that for anyone with ties into the existing Apple ecosystem, or the emerging HomeKit ecosystem, the HomePod and it's integration into those acts as the same type of foundation that allowed the iPod to replace an entire marketplace with one of Apple's making.

Now, that said, there is a glaring and dangerous difference. The iPod gained a lot of it's momentum amongst a young, mobile demographic, and it was a very visible item that gained an almost fashion statement level of iconic visibility. This is a something that a non-descript device that sits within a home simply cannot do, so even if it is a compelling device, many people would never spend the money on something akin to the Bose SoundWave, and because of that, would never see the added value of the HomePod, while an Echo Dot for less than $50 is compelling, particularly with it's hooks into the Amazon ecosystem.