The Crapolla According to Fek'Lar

You know you're screwed when...

You take your beta product out for a road show and find that the beta server, which you never bothered to test outside your building, is 42 times slower on the internet.

You've stumbled onto another issue of The Crapolla, a journal written for software professionals. No not the managers; I mean the people who do the work.

This Crapolla is sponsored by...

In This Issue...

Turn in Your Genitals.

Text Banking

I just got an email from Wells Fargo. They want me to sign up for Text Banking. Huh? So now I have to learn the l33t way of saying, "Give me 20 bucks"? Mmmm...

1 n33P 20 b5(|{$

Or

! n~ 20 b5gk'

Naw, I think I'll stick with the ATM and my own slang.

I'll Tell You What's Wrong With The Universe

IT just sent me an email telling me that one exchange server is down. But since I got the email, it doesn't affect me and I don't care. But if I didn't get the email, it does affect me, and I can't read about it.

There's something wrong with the universe, I've always known it. Turns out it's IT.

Good News!

All the drudgework I needed to get out of the way is now out of the way. I'm back on the prototype!

Here's what all the Rocketmen are
wearing this year.
I also have it on good authority
Harold can get you a good table
if you slip him 20 bucks.

If I'm real lucky, I'll have it done around Thanksgiving. But that doesn't mean it's going to get used. It's a prototype and can be scrapped at any time.

Turns out Harold Peterson doesn't like the colors. Have I mentioned that a burnt-orange fuel tank looks horrible on a white space plane, Rocketman? Those who live with solid-rocket boosters shouldn't throw matches. Just sayin'.

Ouch! I just found a wireframing tool I should have been using all along. I've been writing in HTML forever. Problem is the effort is too big to be completely dispassionate about a prototype. You put in so much effort, you want it to work.

I've been working with some designers on another project who use Balsamiq. This is a tool just for wireframing that lets you build layouts in no time, and thus you build many ideas and throw most away. (At least that's what we've been doing.) After this round I think I'll work Balsamiq into my workflow.

Right now, I'm concerned that I'm seeing cracks in my navigation scheme. Since the tertiary navigation became collapsible, and thus can't be relied on to be there, I've been cramming tertiary navigation into the primary DIV. This looks to be a big mistake. I'll have to do a round where I smooth out the navigation. Perhaps where we really need the tertiary navigation, the DIV wouldn't be able to collapse, and if you have a tiny monitor, you'll just have to suffer. You probably already do.

This begs the question, will there be a completely different layout for mobile devices? It's do'able, the question is, do people on phones really read web sites? I certainly don't. Web pages are too small for these dinky screens. The best applications I see on my iPod are designed to have very few elements, and very large type. Perhaps the mobile people could use better feeds instead of pages. I've got to re-visit RSS anyways; I know we're doing some of it wrong (such as the date format).

Anyways, back to bashing this thing out!

You can watch the development of the prototype at www.lowcomdom.com/prototype. If you have any comments, I'd be interested in hearing them. You can reach me at fek_lar@yahoo.com.

Downer Take 2

I wrote this piece for last month's rag, but it was a complete downer, and threatened to cause people to mass suicide. Here's a re-write that is hopefully, less deadly.

I was in Cambodia (really, I was!), and it hit me. I was on a ferryboat crossing the Mekong river. A young man was drinking from a plastic cup. He finished the drink, and tossed the cup into the river. I remembered earlier that week, I was on a boat downstream in Vietnam's Mekong Delta (I get around). The slower parts of the delta were choked with garbage, including non-biodegradable containers. The nasty truth hit me. Not enough people want to make a change. Then it really hit me. It probably wouldn't matter anyway.

Throughout time the human species has been limited in the same manner as any other species. The population is held down by lack of resources and predators. Resources and predators are two ends of a teeter-totter. The more resources, the more the population can grow. But predators who cull the herd balance this. The strongest of the species survives and procreates. Trouble is, we broke that model, or we thought we did. In the 20th century we addressed both the lack of resources and the predators simultaneously.

On the resources side, we increased food production many magnitudes. What happened in agriculture is nothing short of a miracle. More food means the planet supports more people. So the species increased in number. In the developing world, people are still pumping out babies like it's 1732! For that matter, Octo-Mom isn't helping either!

On the predator side, we had two fronts to fight. And we won on both.

Disease was severely killed off with the discovery of the germ theory. That led to everything from washing your hands, to antibiotics. Life expectancy of the individual doubled.

Add the increase in population from increased resources to the longer lifespan, and you have one hell of a population boom. Then we did one other thing. We invented the atomic bomb. This also (no pun intended) caused the species' numbers to boom. How?

World War II (The Sequel) started in 1932 in Manchuria, and ended in 1946 in Japan. In that 14 years between 50 - 70 million people died as result of war. That's between 3.5 to 5 million people a year. Then we dropped two atomics, and no one ever wanted to go to total war again. The result is about 51 million people (this is a conservative estimate) have died as a result of war since 1946. So less than a million a year, conservatively.

All of the wars that happened during the Cold War were never allowed to get "out of hand" so casualties were fewer than you would expect before mechanized and atomic war. The result? Most people who didn't die in war since 1946 had babies and some of those babies have now had babies. Damn, it's getting crowded!

So here we sit at over 6 billion people, and the planet is changing in so many ways. There have been 5 mass extinctions that we know of in the planet's history. It looks like we've entered a sixth. Why? Each one of us needs some space to live. So more land for us, and less for everything else. Less habitat means less food, water, etc. and so just like resource scarcity used to control our numbers, it still controls the other species. We're losing between 100 to 10,000 species per year depending on whose numbers you believe. The "normal" rate is 1-2 per year.

Think people aren't the cause of climate change? Well, since the whole of the species affect things like weather, erosion, rates of fertilization, etc., if we are causing the sixth mass extinction, we're causing the climate change, and I didn't even mention carbon dioxide.

Earth has a specific gravitational constant. It only changes if something is added or removed from the planet. Adds come from asteroids, and losses come from the space program, both are negligible. So Earth has, for the sake of argument, the same mass as it did before we showed up. Thus, resources are still scarce. There's just so much fresh water (Only the Saudis have done large scale desalinization of sea water), nutrients, and nice apartments.

Crack Open a Diet Coke and Take Anti-Depressants Now!

So how can recycling and "being green" be the answer? Well, it can't. That young man on the boat in Cambodia was doing nothing worse to the environment than someone driving a Prius. Cleaning up all the plastic in the waterways and the ocean isn't part of the real solution. Neither is that main battle tank you've been driving part of the problem. That's only an example of gross waste.

The problem is very simple. But you're not going to like the solution. The population of the human species is way too big for any "green" program to actually stop the mass extinction of species that has been happening for several decades. We need too much food. We need too much lumber. We need too much habitat. There are limits to how little a single person can consume. Even if you got the whole human species to comply, we are too many.

We're still part of nature. The same rules that regulate any other species still applies to us. What is going to happen in inevitable. But how it's going to happen can be our choice.

It's time to turn in your genitals. If you're pumping out babies you're the problem. Even if you are only creating a replacement for each of you, that's too many. I hate to say this, but the Chinese are right. The human species needs to restrict people to one child for every two people already alive. The question is, do we have time for this to work?

My solution is the painless one. In my solution, each person is allow to participate in procreation once. Your strongest natural instinct is still satisfied. You pass on your genes. After you pump out your unit, you are sterilized. Take care of that baby. It's the only one you get. Instead of doubling the population by the end of the century, we drop it down to a more sustainable level. With technological advances, the standard of living for the species can universally rise, and our need for habitat can decrease.

What if I'm just another crackpot? Well, then don't do anything about the problem. Be one of those who thinks humans are too small to affect the planet in any significant way. Maybe read this web site instead. (Just do me a favor and look under the hood of their argument and their motivation.) The alternative approach to lowering our numbers will kick in. As I said, the outcome is inevitable. I'm just offering a choice of how we get there.

We thought we had escaped nature by "taming" the planet. This is such a silly idea. We are, after all, made of earth. We are the part of the planet that is out of balance and must be restricted so the earth can return to a diverse and strong ecosystem. I think climate change is part of this. Soon we may have wars over drinkable water. If you thought we fought over oil, you haven't seen anything yet. To quote Frank Herbert, "water is life".

The climate change will alter the abundance of resources. That translates to a probability of too little food. This culls a species in the most painful way. As people begin to starve, their immune system becomes weaker. Now a bacteria or virus can invade and start wiping out huge sections of the population. Dead bodies breed more disease. The more people who are sick leave fewer to do the agriculture, and you have more famine. The stronger countries will use their military resources to secure food and medicine for their people. The poorer countries will take the brunt of the catastrophe in the beginning. We won't be completely killed off, but taking the population down to about a billion is not out of the question. The die-off is going to make the great plagues of the past look like a case of the sniffles.

The species is going to be reduced in number. The question is, how will this be done? We can ignore the problem, and Mother Nature will be a bitch. Or we can reduce the population voluntarily, and the suffering will be reduced. That's all we're talking about in the end, reducing suffering. One way or another, this population will get smaller.

Now back to cartoons.

This Issue's Headline submission to the National Daily World Enquiring Globe.

It's Nursing Home Field Trip Month

Nude Beaches Are Closed!

Let's play, "Who said this?"

Heard in the halls of various software companies.

"They were fine. Just got over their colds. Me? I was sleeping in someone else's frozen puke."

"I cause stress in men, and I like it!"

"You drove me to soy."

"XML is just like HTML on steroids."

"I realized last night I have a habit of debugging while flossing my teeth. Fewer bugs in the code, fewer bugs in the mouth."

Excuse Me

I need to figure out why I didn't get the latest email from IT.

Fek'Lar
They pay me to think. These are my thoughts. Do you think they are getting their money's worth?

Remember: The Crapolla contains my personal opinions. That's right they're mine, so get your own! And you kids get off my lawn!

Although written with the software professional in mind, my mind tends to wander all over the place, and I sometimes write about politics, mass stoopidity, dumb things I saw, and whatever else comes to mind.

From time to time, I use salty language, thus The Crapolla is not intended for children, or certain people from the Christian Right.

This whole mess is copyright © 2009 by LowComDom Performances, all rights reserved. Wanna send this to your friends? Go ahead and pass out the URL.

feed available from http://www.lowcomdom.com/crapolla/index.xml

EOJ

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