Cloud pool

There was a beautiful sunset tonight after a torrential shower.

Anatomy of a software bug

Anyone who doubts that modern software is unsustainably complex should have a look at this detailed account by Microsoft developer Rick Schaut about how he tracked down a well-known bug in Word. He’s also good on the notion of complexity:

“In this context, ‘complexity’ doesn’t refer to the code itself. Rather, we’re talking about the shear [sic] volume of things the user can do. In Word, for example, we have:

* More than 850 command functions (e.g. Bold and Italic are the same command function)

* More than 1600 distinct commands (e.g. Bold and Italic are distinct commands)

* At any given time roughly 50% of these commands are enabled (conservative estimate)

With just 3 steps, the possible combinations of code execution paths exceeds 500 million.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

The Leica site has a Book of Condolence for HC-B, who probably did more than anyone else to make the Leica synonomous with high-quality photo-reportage. It’s accompanied by this picture. Note the way he cradles the camera to make it unobtrusive to others. He looks as though he’s dressed for a funeral. Wonder when this was taken.

The Great Leap Sideways

Here’s an interesting fact. Of the three great mass-murdering tyrants of the 20th century, two — Hitler and Stalin — are comprehensively excoriated. Nobody in Germany outside of neo-Nazi crazies publicly admires Hitler (though there is an interesting film coming about the last days in the Bunker which attempts to portray him as a human being). Ditto with Stalin in the former Soviet Union. But Mao Zedong is still a fixture in Chinese state iconography.

There are still pictures of the old brute everywhere, and the ruling Communist Party has come up with an interesting mathematical formula which takes care of the fact that he was responsible for the murder of tens of millions of his fellow countrymen: Mao, says the current regime, was “70 per cent good and 30 per cent bad”.

Which brings us neatly to the question of Tony Blair. The difficulty UK voters will have in next year’s General Election is that, with the exception of Iraq and a small number of other indefensible policies or decisions, New Labour is still the best government likely to be available. The Tories are in chaos and possibly in terminal decline. The Liberal Democrats are, well, the Liberal Democrats. So in the end voters will be faced with the conundrum: is Tony Blair 80 per cent good and 20 per cent bad? Or should the ratio be 30/70?