Hello and welcome to my journal. If you're new here, you should be aware that nearly everything in this journal is locked so that it can be viewed only by people on my friends list. The stuff that's publicly available is almost entirely "my professional face"; it generally has to do with computer issues ranging from security alerts to writing about web development, coding, and anecdotes from my consulting work. (Those latter are all carefully anonymized.)

If you're not on my friends list and wish to be, please email me and let me know: what your LJ username is (so I know who to add), and where I know you from (face-to-face meeting, that mailing list we were both on back in 1994, whatever). If I don't already know you, the chance that I will add you is very small. No offense is intended, but the private parts of this journal are private for a reason.

This exercise will show some of the differences between doing something using iteration (a standard "for" loop) and doing it recursively (using a function that calls itself).

Background

The Fibonacci numbers are a series made popular in the 1200s by Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci. To form this sequence, you start with 0 and 1. Each successive number is selected by adding the last two together. So the sequence looks like:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55...

(For example, 3 + 5 = 8. Then 5 + 8 = 13, then 8 + 13 makes 21, and so on.)

The starting zero is considered the "zeroth" Fibonacci number; the 3rd Fibonacci number is 2.

Problem

Write a function that takes a single integer as its argument, and returns the corresponding Fibonacci number. For example, fibonacci(4) should return 3; fibonacci(6) should return 8.

( We solve this problem two different ways: First by using recursion, then by using simple iteration. Along the way, we take a long, hard look at how a recursive algorithm works. We compare the time and resources required by each version, and come to some conclusions about the value of recursive Fibonacci-number generators as a teaching tool in college classrooms. )

Here's an explanation of one of the simplest types of optimizations you can perform. It makes a great introduction to issues of performance, and to the way programmers talk about efficiency.

Problem:

You have a list, or array, of sorted values. (For example, a directory listing, alphabetized by last name, or a dictionary of words.) Write a function that takes one argument, and searches the array. If the argument is found in the array, your function should return the item's index; otherwise, return -1.

Make your function perform as fast as possible, even if the array is thousands of items long.

Assume that the values are in $haystack.

Now that I'm all nice and lubricated from my previous two posts, it's time to start up my other "50 Things" project. Since straytenebrae was the one that suggested this to me, I just have to start off with...

Is It a Palindrome?

(This was a question he asked me when I interviewed at his workplace a few yonks ago. He and I and holyhippie all had some fun with it.) Tooltips are for those who aren't geeky, but are interested anyway; they define common computing terms for those who are wondering "What does 'string' mean to programmers, anyway?"

Problem

Write a function that takes a single string as input, and returns a Boolean value depending on whether the string is a palindrome.

Discussion

A couple of commonly mentioned palindromes in English are "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!" and "Madam, I'm Adam." These two alone are enough to make it clear that the standard "is it or ain't it a palindrome?" rule(s) in English don't really care about punctuation. Or capitals, or any of that crud. It's just a strict "letters only, case-insensitive" thing.

Since Captain Holy Hippie and I already beat this one to death in Perl in my previous entry, I'll reiterate the Perl solution, then also solve it in PHP and JavaScript so that I'll have done enough work to count.

( I'm putting the actual code behind a cut, because I know that only a few of you care, and with three different solutions, this gets kind of long. Future posts, with only one code chunk, may not get cuts. Just so you know. )

Since one of our front-end web engineers will be leaving the company shortly, we have an opening that we'd like to fill if we can. If anyone is interested, I will try to shake loose an official job description or wanted ad. What follows is my own, very unofficial take. If you can fill this job, or you know someone who can, please let me know.

We need someone skilled at front-end layout and page coding. This person doesn't need to come up with the designs and layouts (that's the Art Department's job), but does need to implement what they come up with — take it from mockup or comp to finished product. It needs to work in Firefox and IE (versions 6 and 7), pull data from the back-end as needed, and be maintainable and extensible.

Critical skills, roughly in order of importance:

• HTML and CSS
• JSP and JSTL
• browser differences and bugs
• JavaScript
• image manipulation (presumably in Photoshop, but if you can slice, dice, and tweak images in some other program, I don't think we care what you use)

This person needs to be able to work with source control (we're converting from CVS to Subversion; using a GUI front end such as TortoiseCVS is fine), and work with remote developers in Eastern Europe (don't worry, they speak English; knowing Ukrainian is not a job requirement for US employees!).

Now, since I've recently posted things about how dissatisfied I am, I need to say a little bit more about my employer.

On an objective level, iWin is not a bad place to work. My recent gripes and grumbles are subjective; I've basically hit the point where I don't want to work here any more. A few important points:

• I've been here for a little over 18 months now. That's a long time, in the web development industry.
• Their back end is Java, and I don't like Java.
• I actually might be able to advance my career here, if I moved more into a back-end role, or possibly even if I just stuck at it longer on the front end. But I don't want to do it that way.
• The company is solvent, is over 5 years old, and is now coming out of a slump. They've been profitable before, and they're about to be profitable again.
• A person in the position I'm describing will not be able to put their creative stamp on the iWin web site. But they will have at least some input into the design, and have some opportunities to add their ideas to the mix.

So, that's the down-side. The up-side is considerable:

• iWin understands work-life balance. They do not encourage us to work overtime, come in on weekends, or any of that nonsense. At the end of the day, what we do is make games. Not even intense, high-energy games; we do casual games. We don't feel that the job should be full of stress.
• The pay is good. There are also full benefits: medical, dental, retirement, etc. (No profit-sharing. Bonus plan not guaranteed, but often happens anyway. I forget if we get vision coverage, because I have no use for it.) The deductible on medical is something like $15 per office visit, and a pittance on prescription drugs.
• The company provides lunch every Friday afternoon, and generally throws a party about every three months or so.
• The people are pretty fun to work with. This is the first job I've had in quite some time where I actually wanted to invite some of my co-workers to my parties.
• You'd be working under the man I call "General Wāro" in my "Tales of the Ninja Coder". This man is a very good manager, and one of the best bosses I've ever had. In fact, trying not to leave him short-handed is one of the main reasons why I'm taking the risk of leaving this post unlocked — if one of my friends' friends might work out, I want them to be able to see this.

All in all, iWin is a great place to work. It's just not the right place for me any more.

Note that this is not attempting to fill my own position; this is the other front-end person, who's worked here for over three years. Her last day is fast approaching.

If you can do this, or you know someone who can, please let me know or direct them here. Thanks.

This is a general message for anyone who has (or might contract) the sore throat that's been going around lately. Quoting from the journal of someone who got it a couple of days ahead of me:

Phase 2 is apparently nausea.... Warning! If you have a sore throat now, be very very careful with yourself to try to avoid the nausea phase.... Also, I hear this comes back with a vengeance if you relapse.

Take care of yourselves, people. I now feel much better about my decision to skip work today. Also, I note that this thing seems to be awfully infectious. If you have it, do your friends and co-workers a favor, and stay home.

First of all, I'd like to apologize for the great length of this post. However, I think it's significant enough material that I don't feel like LJ-cutting it. I hope you'll read it all, and consider it deeply.

We're Leaving Livejournal. Soon.

It seems Livejournal and Six Apart are slowly self-destructing under the weight of their own incompetence and inconsistency. feyandstrange and I have decided that we will no longer be supporting Livejournal; we cannot, in good conscience, give them our money any longer. Nor will we support them by creating any new accounts (such as the ninja coder account I'd been planning on starting up, once I get the flaws worked out of the metaphor that it rests on).

My account is currently paid up until January 12th; Fey's is only paid until October 2nd. Once our current paid accounts revert to free accounts, we'll probably be using other services instead. To the extent possible, we'll try to make sure that either people can find our new blogs, or the posts from the new blogs are automatically sent back to LJ, or both. Fey is looking strongly at GreatestJournal; I'm likely to set up three different blogs: a "professional" (i.e., technical) one on my professional site; a separate blog on its own domain for the ninja coder; and maybe a third, personal, blog on GJ or some similar place.

Our Reasons for Leaving:

Over the past year or so, Livejournal has committed a number of basic blunders in relating to its own user base, and the frequency of these blunders is increasing. At the same time, they've now started doing things that make it very difficult to see them as "well-meaning but incompetent"; instead, they now appear to be actually duplicitous. Specifically:

The Strikeout

Presumably, you already know about the Great LJ Strikeout of 2007. 'Nuff said there, right? If you don't know about that issue, none of the rest of this will make much sense.

Removing Strikeouts

This one hasn't been particularly noticed: In the aftermath of The Strikeout, LJ made a change to the way it displays deactivated user accounts: they no longer appear with strikeout lines through them. Instead, they simply fail to have a little "head and shoulders" icon next to them.

To make this even more confusing, this new style takes effect in posts and comments, but not on userinfo pages. Since the lists of friends on one's userinfo page already lack icons, those names still get strikethroughs.

Huh? This seems like nothing so much as a rapidly-deployed and poorly-tested hack, the sole intent of which is (apparently) to make it harder to tell at a glance whose account has been deleted.

Later Suspensions of Users for Fan-Art

In August, Livejournal had another apparent panic attack, and deleted the journals of a user who had posted a drawing of Severus Snape giving Harry Potter a blow job, and another user who re-posted the same image. This touched off a new round of explanations in lj_biz (and also spawned the "How will you be suspended from LJ?" meme on Memegen). However, it didn't actually clarify things at all; some users took to writing open letters to LJ/SA, just to ask for clarifications about the various vaguenesses and inconsistencies in their policy statements.

Bad Attitude by LJ/SA Employees

Apparently Livejournal employee burr86 managed to really, seriously piss off a lot of people with a poor attempt at a joke in efw at about the same time. The post containing the attempted joke has since been deleted (and I'm not sure by whom). According to other rumors, there were two other LJ employees treating users cavalierly in the same thread — or maybe some other thread.

It's hard to be certain about any of this, partly because the thread's been deleted, and partly because LJ has been pretty bad about keeping anyone informed. (Not that we'd necessarily believe them anyway.) Which just leads into another problem...

Failure to Talk to Users; Inconsistency When They Do

This one works on two different levels: First, users whose accounts are deleted are apparently not contacted or given any warning first. They're given no opportunity to remove the offending material; instead, many of them find out that their account has been deleted when they attempt to login and can't.

Second, Livejournal and Six Apart also fail to communicate in any useful way with the rest of their users. After the first Strikeout, we had to wait five full days before we got any acknowledgement from LJ that anything had happened. In the weeks since then, we've gotten various muddled and incoherent "clarifications", none of which seem to clarify things enough.

"Enough" can even be defined pretty easily: things would be "clear enough" if the average LJ user had a reasonably firm idea of what they could post and what they couldn't. Yes, you could say that the users who got banned most recently were not quite "innocent", because they were testing the boundaries of what was and was not acceptable. But that's just the point: someone had to go and test those boundaries, because we can't figure it out from all the conflicting things LJ keeps saying. Even when they claim to be clarifying, they state that they will not change or update the Terms of Service to reflect the new policy, so now we know that the ToS isn't worth the electrons it's written on.

Indeed, it seems they're now actively claiming that they will be following policies that are in direct contradiction to statements in the Terms of Service.

"Child Pornography" Account Deletions

I've put "child pornography" in scare quotes because the image that started the fan-art suspension dust-up was a drawing of Severus Snape going down on Harry Potter. So, not only was it a drawing, it also depicted a pair of fictional characters. No actual people were harmed in the creation of this work.

Livejournal employees have repeatedly claimed that the work was child pornography, and that the law specifies that even drawings are included. The legalese they've quoted appears to be from the 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act, which was very definitively struck down by the Supreme Court in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 2002.

So LJ's legal reasoning is incredibly suspect, at best.

This doesn't mean that they aren't allowed to remove whatever they want. They're perfectly at liberty to decline to get into a nasty First Amendment lawsuit, and they're also at liberty to decide that, "Well, maybe we might get into such a suit, but not over a picture of Snape blowing Harry. I mean, come on, if we're going to spend that much effort, can't it be for something with literary or artistic merit, like Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet?"

But they aren't saying that. They're saying "this stuff is kiddie porn, we're legally obligated to remove it". They either don't understand the law even as well as I do (i.e., they're painfully ignorant), or they're just plain lying.

Lack of Deletions for Other Causes

While LJ/SA carry on about supposed "kiddie porn", a large number of users say they've made reports about harassing behavior, hate speech, incitement to violence, threats of violence, and other such problems. These reports have apparently gone completely unaddressed. (One commonly-mentioned addition to the list I just gave is "pro-ana communities", which are also allowed to flourish. I'm leaving them out, because it's not at all clear that those would involve any legal problems. Incitements to kill all homosexuals, however, are another story.)

Possible Reports to the Government

This one is open to interpretation, but: according to one thread in LJ's attempt at policy clarifications, "We report child pornography to the NCMEC, as required by law." Since LJ appears unable to tell the difference between fan art and actual child pornography, it seems reasonable to assume that users whose accounts were deleted for Harry Potter fan art may well have been reported to the authorities.

This is completely intolerable. Fey and I will not be a party to such behavior. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why I'm strongly considering removing my LJ account completely after giving people some time to get used to where my new blogs are.

Brad Fitzgerald Is Leaving

Now, it's not like bradfitz is a major reason for anyone to stick around. And it's really just coincidence that his stock options (aka "Golden Handcuffs") vested at just the right time to drop a cherry on top of the sundae that Six Apart has been scooping up lately. But, still... if Brad thought the place was worth staying at, he'd stay. The fact that he's leaving doesn't necessarily "speak volumes", but it does make a statement.

All that was as of a few weeks ago. While I've been writing, editing, and polishing this essay, new developments have suddenly taken place that simply add to the overall "sinking ship" feeling.

Much More Recent Developments:

Had you heard that they've canned Barak Berkowitz? Okay, maybe they'd never actually put it in quite those terms (and certainly not in a press release). But we've come to realize that we have to read between the lines in everything Livejournal and Six Apart say, so here are the most noticeable things:

• They recently posted in lj_biz to mention it. Not directly, of course; just a two-line blurb mentioning "some news about the leadership at Six Apart", and providing a couple of links to Mena Trott's blog and to the press release.
• As you can see if you followed the "posted in lj_biz" link above, the LJ staff turned off comments on that particular lj_biz entry. Or at least, it looks that way... but it turns out, they didn't initially post it with comments disabled: first it garnered a few (very snarky!) comments, and then LJ staff locked the post and deleted the comments. I do not have words to express the lameness involved in that. Thankfully, someone had the presence of mind to grab a screen capture...
• The LJ staff also didn't bother to mention Mr. Berkowitz' departure in news. In fact, they more recently posted another piece of news in lj_biz, namely the fact that they're adjusting their Omniture site-metric system to start observing roughly 5% of pages on the site, including people's (public only) journal entries, friends pages, comments, and so on. As far as I can see (as a somewhat privacy-conscious web geek), what they're doing really isn't heinous at all. But then, why not post openly about it in news?
• In fact, what they have posted in news lately is pretty much fluff, when there are real issues going on. Quite a few commenters on that post have pointed out exactly that.
• Some of them also tried to point out other things, but couldn't, because some of their comments were screened for unclear reasons.

Enough is enough. We were prepared for things to be a little rocky, for a little while, after the acquisition by Six Apart. And we waited, to see if things would get better.

They're not. They're getting worse.

And they've gotten bad enough that, for Fey and I, leaving is not simply a matter of convenience, or of "I suppose we could find better/cheaper service somewhere else". It's a matter of conscience. We cannot, in good conscience, support Six Apart's policies any longer. We certainly can't give them any more money, but even having an active Livejournal account boosts their usage numbers, and so gives them some measure of support. So don't assume that our journals will continue to be here for much longer.

So, Where Will We Be?

My guess is, some combination of GreatestJournal, InsaneJournal, and our own personal domain(s). I'm currently investigating blogging packages that I can host on Finrod.

We will keep you all posted on wherever we decide to go.

Since I was out at the Lucky 13 tonight, my throat is pretty badly ripped up. (Shouting over huge amounts of ambient noise is simply not my friend.) So I'm having a nice, piping hot cup of Tazo Green Ginger tea, with copious amounts of lemon juice and honey.

And, having had lots of this tea back when I had a sore throat, I feel compelled to post about the pros and cons of this tea...

Pro:
Green tea, with ginger infused right in the tea bag! Yum!

Con:
Every single f***in' bag comes in an envelope that says on it:

"There is a garden overlooking the Yangtze River gorge where an elderly man contemplates his life while sipping a cup of Green Ginger. Perhaps you would like to join him."

I cannot possibly express how incredibly tired I am of the image of this old geezer sitting there watching the water go by, sipping his tea, and thinking: "My life. Hmmmm... there's not a whole lot to contemplate there. You know, maybe I'd have more to think about when I look back on my life if I hadn't spent so goddamn much of it just sitting here, sipping my fuckin' tea! Hey, you know what? Maybe I should have, at the very least, tried visiting the Huang He River or the Xijiang River. Or, you know what? Maybe I could have spent some of my life sipping some other beverage, like oolong tea... or even something completely other than tea, if I'd been feeling really adventurous."

Do you suppose Tazo could have coughed up the extra dough to maybe put a variety of different stupid scene descriptions on their tea-bag envelopes? Then at least I wouldn't have to be bored to tears by the wasted life of this poor Chinese man every time I wanted to drink a cup of tea. Instead, there could be a whole cast of characters:

• There is a Zen garden in Kyoto where a wise monk sips some Green Ginger as he meditates on the nature of enlightenment.
• In Beijing, a businesswoman starts her day with a refreshing cup of Green Ginger tea. You can drink the same tasty, invigorating blend.
• Just one whiff of our Green Ginger tea will set your spirit at ease and your mind at peace.

There's all kinds of places they could have gone with this, including to the friggin' teahouse of the August Moon. Instead, all we get is one lousy description about an old guy on the Yangtze River gorge. Puh-leeze.

And let's not even get me started on the really annoying question that constantly bedevils my copyeditor-brain: That final sentence, about "Perhaps you would like to join him." Should that be a statement, or should it be a question? I think, if I really had to make a decision, I'd go with the option Tazo chose: it's a statement. "Perhaps it will rain." "Perhaps you would like to join him." "I don't know why she swallowed the fly. Perhaps she'll die."

But every so often, especially late at night, I wonder: Wouldn't it work at least as well if phrased as a question? "Perhaps you would like to join him?" No, that doesn't work. But maybe they should have just rephrased it entirely: "Wouldn't you like to join him?" As marketing-speak goes, I think that would actually be stronger — it includes a "call to action", rather than simply being a statement.

I am obviously spending far too much mental effort on this. And that just adds to the con.

Pro:
<sips some tea> Okay, that's some yummy stuff, right there.