Category: Programming

If you monitor human-human interaction, you do it on your own time, understand?

September 24, 2004 /

I’ve been thinking about my performance evaluations class (which I’m failing, but still find interesting, except for the math), Leonard’s comment on bad metrics and the concept of keystroke counters and loggers (thanks to spam). There’s a quote in the textbook for the aforementioned class, “that which is monitored improves,” attributed to “Source Unknown.” So I can’t call out the person who said it for being wrong, which it is.

Here’s a handy set of heuristics for deciding when to monitor. For you! It would be better drawn as a flowchart or tree, but I’m lazy.

Good Things To Monitor

  • Efficiency of system-system interaction, based on system output

  • Quality of human-system interaction, with the goal of improving the system, based on user-satisfaction output

Bad Things To Monitor

  • Quality of human-system interaction, with the goal of improving the human
  • Quality of human-system interaction, based on system output

Incidentally, this also covers the basis of the problem I have with standardized testing. Or the lecture-test educational system as a whole, in fact.

Update 09.25.2004 1054 hrs: Leonard has pointed out to me that I somehow copied the wrong Crummy hyperlink. It’s fixed.

I feel like getting arrested

September 3, 2004 /

Hey, wanna see if you’re a terrorist? Excuse me–“Specially Designated National or Blocked Person?” Thanks to the Department of the Treasury, you can, in PDF or ASCII flavors! (As stated above, I do feel like getting arrested, so I was going to write a form script that would search the file for you, but it’s 1.35Mb of unmarked-up plaintext, and I don’t want to kill my webhost with that much sequential search.)

I’m aware of this list because today I had to write down some personal info and sign a release form at work. My company could be getting a federal contractor as a client, so every employee name has to be checked against the list. Fair enough. I don’t like that, but it is the law.

I do have a problem, though, with the fact that we contracted an outside firm to do the checking. Everybody in this company had to sign a paper saying that neither my employer nor this firm were liable for any consequence of having yourself checked. Then everybody had to print his or her first, middle and last names, DOB, and SSN. The forms will be sent off to VeriCorp, who of course can be trusted with my SSN and corresponding information! I guess!

Keep in mind that my employers are probably paying thousands of dollars for this: VeriCorp is going to take a list of a few hundred names, then they’re going to take the text file linked above, and they’re going to have some people hit CTRL-F a few times. And if one of those people makes a typo and you go to Secret Terrorist Jail, whoops! Oh well! They’re not liable!

I am making use of hyperbole here, obviously. Nobody’s going to go to jail; if you’re on the SDN list and the FBI doesn’t know where you are, you’re certainly not going to be working under your real name, much less putting it down on that form. This whole thing is a redundancy measure, a legal fallback.

My point is that there is no reason to be sending hundreds of people’s personal info to an outside contractor, liability-free, when the list is publicly available, and we have an in-house software development team who are all experts at data correlation. I guess the potential client doesn’t trust us to verify our own employees, because we’re an interested party in the negotiations. But if they don’t trust us to verify the information correctly, why trust us to send it correctly in the first place?

May 19, 2004 /

I’ve done a lot of work today, but I’ve also spent hours geeking out over my camera that I don’t actually own yet and can’t afford. This is silly, because I have no serious photography equipment or experience, and even if I did I’ll already be putting myself into debt this fall to buy or build a new computer.

Regardless, I’ve been looking at it for a year with absolutely undiminished hunger (so long the price dropped). There are two things I can think of on which I’ve geeked out this long and this hard:

  • The trip to Comic Con this summer.
  • A good camera with which to take pictures on that trip.

The former is rapidly becoming a reality, as I paid for the train tickets a couple of days ago. I hope the latter can too.

Once, the thought of a new computer would have filled me with butterflies. Now it’s more a hassle than anything–I can’t afford one, but I have to get one, because my current box is no longer capable of doing the work I need to do in grad school. The Digital Rebel has taken its place, I think. It’s a specialized technical hobby; it’s highly modular; the value of my investment drops very quickly; and it’s going to take me years to get any good at it, by which time I’ll cringe at the things I inflict on you when I’m starting out. Man, I can’t wait.

May 18, 2004 /

If anybody knows why TSQL has ten thousand date formats and the ability to guess how much two words sound alike, but no capacity to find and remove one character from a string, please tell me.

April 28, 2004 /

Worked hard all day today on a big Internet Applications project (my very first servlet!) and have it practically done, which is pretty neat. In celebration, Maria and I are watching X-Mans on my new (used) DVD. Starting at 2320 hrs. I have to get up at 0630 hrs. This is gonna be awesome.

April 24, 2004 /

This morning, there was a kid two floors down screaming about helicopters for a good solid hour. Also, there were a bunch of helicopters. It was that kind of morning.

(Note: the preceding paragraph exists only to make sure that on April 24th, 2005, the first “Today in History” entry won’t be so obviously referencing the second one.)

A year ago, apparently, I was gasping with horror that I’d left the same cam pic up for a week; now I’m noticing that it’s practically May and I’ve only taken like ten all year. I don’t think I’m all that short on ideas; it’s just that since I no longer have to hit the NFD front page to make sure an entry has posted right, I hardly ever see it and ergo don’t get sick of it. This is really an advantage–remember, NewsBruiser Makes Everything Better–but I don’t want to let all my content feeds get neglected. I need to take more. Anybody want a plastic mullet portrait?

I really need to get around to what I’ve been planning to do since fall 2002, which is put up a navigable IdiotCam© archive and, while I’m at it, enable time-lapse cam posts into the future. I might as well hack together an RSS feed while I’m at it. Yet another project for the summer.