Second third prize

We have won the third prize in the first competition! Not quite as good as a second or a first, but still a sign that we're doing something right and a cause for celebration. (waves a small flag)

Our record for 2007 is two for two: two competitions, two prizes (both thirds). Now I am even more curious to see how the second competition will do (judging on the 18th). [Updated: find out here.]

Head-first into the weekend

To the office for a few hours, attending the latter half (!) of a project meeting about the second competition. I lasted twenty minutes before pushing my way to the podium and snatching the conductor's baton from G (as it were), and forcing the buggers finally to make some damned decisions. My head aches (literally) from listening to "Well, it might be nice like this, but then again doing it like this might also not be nice." Gah!

Life is too damned short for cowardly shit like that, not if you want me to be at the table. So I forced them to swallow hard and accept the basic truth of things which they had all known but nobody was willing categorically to state. I am pleased to say that the final half-hour of that meeting accomplished more than the previous three hours.

I nearly burst a seam on discovering that neither of the new hires could state how large the building envelope was! How can this be: you work—allegedly, apparently—for three weeks on a project and don't know even to the nearest hundred square metres how large it is? Absurd! It is to cry out loud in frustration and disbelief.

And they don't even attempt to follow and test their own precepts: there was much talk about keeping thematic sections together in specific areas of the building, but they had not tested whether the sections could fit into those areas! Ridiculous.

Now, I know that I am very much more numerate than many other people: I can do arithmetic in my head as fast as G can use a desktop calculator, and I can usually tell at a glance whether a number (up to four digits) is prime or not, and I can remember sequences of significant numbers (i.e. the size in square metres of almost every room in our competition). I know that this is extremely odd and peculiar, but still: how can anyone, however un-mathematical, possibly work for three weeks on a building and not know intimately how large it is? Does not compute.

Today's Friday Favourite is the most thrilling section of a wonderful piece of music, one of Wolfgang's finest (and indeed final) moments. I have three recordings of it, of differing vintages and styles. This, the source of the link above, is probably my least favourite, but I found it most suitable as an introduction to the piece because of the exemplary clarity of the recording. My favourite musically is this, but I listen most often to this. Enjoy.

Progress, and unrelated matters

The first competition (as we now must call it) has reached a very interesting point. After much debate and many failed attempts, we discovered a form last night (an urban design, a shape in the landscape) which is just brilliant. Very simple: a long, low rectangle along the eastern boundary of the site; but it's just somehow exactly right. Everyone who sees it is impressed. I'm really pleased with the project now, after a week of fending off despair when it just wouldn't come together. This will be at least a third prize unless we really screw up the disposition of the rooms (and that is always possible, since the people who wrote the briefing documents are not judging the competition).

The sun was nearly setting as I walked home today at 7 p.m. Winter is just around the corner! This is probably my most favourite of favourite seasons (i.e. they're all good, each in its own way). The new year begins in Autumn for me, not in January (but then, I've written about that before).

In other news it was thirty years ago tomorrow that I first heard Keith Jarrett's "Köln Concert", at around 1:30 in the afternoon. It was during the introduction week of my first year at university, when various famous and exciting professor-types would spend an hour each telling us how lucky we were to attend that particular college. The most famous of them all, so egregiously famous that even I had heard of him, broke the mould—as he had made a career of doing—by saying nothing at all. He just put on Part II of "Köln" and started a slide-show of student work from previous years. Marvellous. His presentation is the only event in that week which I still remember.

In other, other news Dale is on a roll, his last two posts are quite brilliant. There are times when I can hardly bear to read Dale's blog, his writing is so wonderful and his insights so ... insightful that they make my own little bloggeries seem quite inadequate.

In otherest news courtesy of Joe in Vegas, a trio of videos for your pleasure and/or annoyance. The first takes on the burning, unaddressed social issue of porn for nerds. The video itself is quite funny and harmless, despite the title, but the rest of the site and in particular the ads in the right column are definitely not things you want the boss to see on your monitor. Go to Joe's and try to view it on his blog, i.e. without the unsafe ads; but it wouldn't run for me there. (It starts by asking your birthday, to prove that you're over twenty-one; just pick a year before 1996 and you're rolling. Call me paranoid, but I would never tell my birthday or any other real information to such a website.) The second video tries a bit too hard, but the third is the funniest of them all—assuming (as I do) that it's faked, otherwise one would have to think it quite horrific. Your mileage may vary.

Sticky

Spent the day with G, U and her parents, painting the walls of their new office. This wasn't intended to happen, they had thought when viewing the space full of furniture that it was good enough to leave "as is;" but seeing it empty last night when they picked up the keys, they realized that it was just too dirty to be comfortable in.

We took down a supernumary cable tray and filled the resulting holes, taped the floor and ceiling edges all around (we didn't paint the ceiling), then broke for coffee. G spent the day painting the short "signature wall" by the entrance bright red (two coats) while I did all the rolling on every other wall and U's father painted the wall edges at floor and cable tray. G was still unsatisfied with his red wall, so I rollered it again and it turned out perfect: seamless and even, bright saturated red. Partly the effect of the third coat, but also the justly famous Udge Rolling Technique. At the risk of seeming immodest, I have to state that I am one of the world's best painters (wall and ceiling, not canvas). Sorry, the technique is a family secret that I dare not divulge.

U's parents are of German stock but grew up in Rumania (fairly common, actually: the Austro-Hungarian Empire spread Germans throughout Eastern Europe, many of whom returned or were expelled to Germany after the war). At one point, U's mother said to her husband, "Look at Udge go! He's working like a Greek." How odd: to the Rumanians, the Greeks were models of industry and skill, whereas to an Englishman raised on the Durrell brothers and their ilk, they are slow, lazy and slipshod.

In any case: I am now sticky with paint and pleasantly tired. I shall sleep well tonight (tempting fate).

Insecurity again

Just over two years ago, I wrote

Fact: the new superduper multilinked know-everything-about-everyone complex of databases that the White House wants, will be just as fallible and easy to compromise as LexisNexis' systems were, because they will be staffed by the same people: undertrained, underpaid, unrespected employment agency temps. It doesn't matter how good the database security is, if a gullible fool is answering the phone. Properly trained people, intelligent enough to hear an alarm bell when a stranger offers them candy, will not work for peanuts; and even in these days of homeland security everybody wants things done cheaply.

A half-dozen recent articles indicate that I was right, for instance:

The Homeland Security Department, the lead U.S. agency for fighting cyber threats, suffered more than 800 hacker break-ins, virus outbreaks and other computer security problems over two years, senior officials acknowledged to Congress.

In one instance, hacker tools for stealing passwords and other files were found on two internal Homeland Security computer systems. The agency's headquarters sought forensic help from the department's own Security Operations Center and the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team it operates with Carnegie Mellon University.

In other cases, computer workstations in the Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Administration were infected with malicious software detected trying to communicate with outsiders; laptops were discovered missing; and agency Web sites suffered break-ins.
source

and

Congress asked Homeland Security's chief information officer, Scott Charbo, who has a Masters in plant science, to account for more than 800 self-reported vulnerabilities over the last two years and for recently uncovered systemic security problems in US-VISIT, the massive computer network intended to screen and collect the fingerprints and photos of visitors to the United States. [...]

US-VISIT has a long history of security problems and failing government audits. Though the system is supposed to be self-contained,some undisclosed number of US-VISIT computers running Microsoft 2000 were infected by the Zotob worm in August of 2005, revealing not only that the system lacked good patch management, but that somehow the system touches the internet. DHS attempted to hide the evidence, but a persistent government sunshine lawsuit from Wired revealed the infection in the fall of 2006.
source

and

Expect harsh words from the Committee's chair Bennie Thompson who is slated to pound DHS for hypocrisy: with questions like "How can the Department of Homeland Security be a real advocate for sound cybersecurity practices without following some of its own advice?" and "How can we ask the private sector to better train employees and implement more consistent access controls when DHS allows employees to send classified emails over unclassified networks and contractors to attach unapproved laptops to the network?"
source

I told you so. Colour me "smug."

How I spend my days

I'm sorry to report that I did not have fun in the sun today: there was no sunshine. 3°C, cloudy with intermittent rain and moderately high winds. Bah.

Instead, I've had an absolutely fascinating day at work on the database.

The fun started when I noticed that an address book exported from Outlook 6 differs from an address book exported from Outlook 5. Microsoft changed the rules yet again, the swine! The difference is simple but crucial: Outlook 5 used the tab character to separate fields in the exported data. This was a very sensible way to structure the data, because one cannot normally enter a tab character into a text stream: the computer understands it as the command "jump to the next field please." Outlook 6 has thrown that out, to Hell with sensible: it uses the semicolon ; to separate fields. This is an absurd change to have made, because the world is full of semicolons; they occur all the time; there can be several in a single sentence.

How does the importing software know the difference between a content semicolon in the middle of a sentence, and a separator semicolon that marks the division between two fields (e.g. First name;Last name). As a test I exported a few addresses containing random semicolons ("Ud;ge") from Outlook 6 and opened the file in Excel; to my surprise it worked perfectly, Excel was able to tell the difference between content and separator.

Obviously there must be a difference in the file. I opened it in a text editor, and discovered how it works: Microsoft solved the problem that they had just created by inventing a second kind of separator: the pair of characters ;" coming immediately together marks the beginning of a block of text that should be left untreated until the pair "; coming immediately together marks the end of the block. As my experiment with Excel shows, it works fine with normal content.

But what about abnormal content, e.g. He said "Never"; they walked out? The computer would take "; for a marker, and assume that what follows ("they walked out") is the next field, and so would arrive at the end of the line with a field left over and nowhere to put it, and the import would crash and burn. (Excel does indeed fail when importing such data.)

I thought for a long while about how to solve this problem, then decided not to solve it: why should I do Microsoft's homework for them? I implemented the check for ;" and "; pairs, and left it at that. If it crashes, it crashes. I shall tell any complaining users to try the file in Excel and call me back if-and-only-if it works correctly there. But I shall rewrite my database's export routines to solve this issue correctly.

Memo to Bill Gates: Microsoft seems to be running out of common sense; my e-mail address is at the top left; my rates are very reasonable.

Pride and pointlessness

I'll have you know that this blog is now the fourth item on Google when searching for "Blessed Willibald." The ad dollars will start pouring in any day now. Oh yes.

That is all. Sorry, too tired and still feeling less-than-good. I have Friday off from the architects, so then at the latest there will be some substantial blogging.