Salon.com > Ellen Ullman

Warning. Warning. Warning. Fatal error. Stop.

Fri, 16 May 2003 19:30:00 +0000

On March 5, 1984, Berta Walton, a novice software tester (who describes herself as "a failed academic, a linguist with a Ph.D. during the Ph.D. glut of the 1980s, itinerant untenured instructor of Linguistics 101, desperate striver out of the lumpen professoriat") stumbles across a bug. She fills out a bug report and brings it to the responsible programmer, Ethan Levin. With a twitch of his head, without looking up, Ethan tells her to put it on his desk. And there she leaves it, the first report of the bug officially designated UI-1017, its count of days-open set to zero and ticking. Says Berta: "A tester found a bug, a programmer ignored a tester, a bug report went to the top of a pile on a programmer's messy desk -- nothing could have been more normal than what had just happened."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Days open: 0

Hurrah for slow recounts

Thu, 09 Nov 2000 01:08:00 +0000

I know all this will one day be replaced by a Web page: this makeshift polling place in the rec room of an apartment building, the leatherette sofas in front of a big-screen TV where some voters are now sitting with their ballots, the fumblings over the voter rolls as people check in, the ballot-counting machine in the corner going bee-dee, bee-dee, like some electronic slot machine. Even the uncertainty of the next morning -- waking up to find we still don't know who'll be the next president of the United States -- will be gone, too, replaced by the furious efficiency of chips and fiber optics. By instantaneous, real-time counts (You are the 235,789th voter of 457,889 registered). By the predictable outlines of Microsoft Internet Explorer: clean, uniform, fast.

Internet voting is surely coming. Though online ballots cannot be made secure, though the problems of voter authentication and privacy will remain unsolvable, I suspect we'll go ahead and do it anyway. Click here for the leader of the free world. It will be too easy, too convenient, too familiar to resist. After we have put our intimate secrets and credit card numbers online, what can prevent us from putting our elections there as well?

Twilight of the crypto-geeks

Thu, 13 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

On the first day of the 10th Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference -- the unique annual meeting that brings together an unlikely combination of programmers, activists and government officials -- two very different events took place simultaneously.

One: About 30 participants and 50 observers crowded into a hotel meeting room for a workshop led by Lenny Foner -- computer guy in jeans and long hair, MIT Media Lab Ph.D. Foner was trying to get the group interested in starting up a new domain name system for the Internet. He was probably thinking Linux; he was most likely hoping for a Linus Torvalds sort of role. His idea was to maybe "route around" the current, dispute-prone system of matching Internet addresses to names. Maybe we should make a superset of the DNS, the workshop considered, or an alternative to it, or something -- no one could even agree on the precise nature of the problem, let alone its solution.

The dumbing-down of programming

Wed, 13 May 1998 19:00:00 +0000

I used to pass by a large computer system with the feeling that it represented the summed-up knowledge of human beings. It reassured me to think of all those programs as a kind of library in which our understanding of the world was recorded in intricate and exquisite detail. I managed to hold onto this comforting belief even in the face of 20 years in the programming business, where I learned from the beginning what a hard time we programmers have in maintaining our own code, let alone understanding programs written and modified over years by untold numbers of other programmers. Programmers come and go; the core group that once understood the issues has written its code and moved on; new programmers have come, left their bit of understanding in the code and moved on in turn. Eventually, no one individual or group knows the full range of the problem behind the program, the solutions we chose, the ones we rejected and why.

The dumbing-down of programming

Tue, 12 May 1998 19:00:00 +0000

Last month I committed an act of technical rebellion: I bought one operating system instead of another. On the surface, this may not seem like much, since an operating system is something that can seem inevitable. It's there when you get your machine, some software from Microsoft, an ur-condition that can be upgraded but not undone. Yet the world is filled with operating systems, it turns out. And since I've always felt that a computer system is a significant statement about our relationship to the world -- how we organize our understanding of it, how we want to interact with what we know, how we wish to project the whole notion of intelligence -- I suddenly did not feel like giving in to the inevitable.

My intention had been to buy an upgrade to Windows NT Server, which was a completely sensible thing for me to be doing. A nice, clean, up-to-date system for an extra machine was the idea, somewhere to install my clients' software; a reasonable, professional choice in a world where Microsoft platforms are everywhere. But somehow I left the store carrying a box of Linux from a company called Slackware. Linux: home-brewed, hobbyist, group-hacked. UNIX-like operating system created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds then passed around from hand to hand like so much anti-Soviet samizdat. Noncommercial, sold on the cheap mainly for the cost of the documentation, impracticable except perhaps for the thrill of actually looking at the source code and utterly useless to my life as a software engineering consultant.

sliced off by the cutting edge

Thu, 16 Oct 1997 09:51:00 +0000

This is the second of two excerpts in Salon 21st from Ellen Ullman's new
book, "Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents" (City
Lights Books, $21.95, 189 pages), an autobiographical exploration of the
lives and minds of software engineers.

It had to happen to me sometime: sooner or later I would have to lose sight of the cutting edge. That moment every technical person fears -- the fall into knowledge exhaustion, obsolescence, techno-fuddy-duddyism -- there was no reason to think I could escape it forever. Still, I didn't expect it so soon. And not there: not at the AIDS project I'd been developing, where I fancied myself the very deliverer of high technology to the masses.

It happened in the way of all true-life humiliations: when you think you're better than the people around you. I had decided to leave the project; I agreed to help find another consultant, train another team. There I was, finding my own replacement. I called a woman I thought was capable, experienced -- and my junior. I thought I was doing her a favor; I thought she should be grateful.

Disappearing into the code

Thu, 09 Oct 1997 09:03:00 +0000

I have no idea what time it is. There are no windows in this office and
no clock, only the blinking red LED display of a microwave, which flashes
12:00, 12:00, 12:00, 12:00. Joel and I have been programming for days. We
have a bug, a stubborn demon of a bug. So the red pulse no-time feels
right, like a read-out of our brains, which have somehow synchronized
themselves at the same blink rate.

"But what if they select all the text and --"

" -- hit Delete."

"Damn! The NULL case!"

"And if not we're out of the text field and they hit space --"

"-- yeah, like for --"

"-- no parameter --"

"Hell!"

"So what if we space-pad?"

"I don't know ... Wait a minute!"

"Yeah, we could space-pad --"

" -- and do space as numeric."

"Yes! We'll call SendKey(space) to --"

"-- the numeric object."

"My God! That fixes it!"

"Yeah! That'll work if --"

"-- space is numeric!"

"-- if space is numeric!"