Chapter 31: We’re Only Speculating

July 19, 2000, Chicago, Illinois

“Got a minute?” Terry asked from the door to my office mid-morning on Wednesday,

“Sure. Here? Or your place?”

“Pennyfull is OK!” he grinned.

“You guys are fucking hilarious,” Penny deadpanned.

“Nose to the grindstone, Penelope,” I said.

“You aren’t my boss, asshole!” Penny growled.

“Must be that time of the month,” I chuckled.

“One word out of you, Terry,” Penny threatened, “and you’ll be sleeping with Pete!”

Terry and I laughed, then I got up and we went to the «zabuton».

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Sherry and her QA team found their third memory-management issue in the past two weeks. One memory leak, one use-after-free, and one null pointer de-reference.”

“Front or back?”

“Two in the backend, one in the front.”

“Released code?”

“No, nightly builds.”

“Thank Loki for small favors,” I replied. “Who wrote the code?”

“That’s being dealt with,” Terry declared. “What I need you to do is take responsibility for supervising code reviews. I also want you to work with Sam and Sherry to update our coding standards and figure out the best approach to preventing this in the future.”

“Don’t write shitty code?” I joked.

“Obviously, but that needs to be fleshed out. We haven’t updated our coding standards, testing procedures, and code review guidelines for a couple of years. I’ll also want you and Sam to do some ‘tech talks’ about code reviews. We haven’t done those in a couple of years, either.”

“What do you attribute this to?”

“Not enough C programming in college. Too much VB and Java the past few years. And you know there’s no replacement for experience. And the coursework C coding is pretty simple, and the kids are developing bad habits by doing most of their work in Java or VB.”

“I’ll talk to Dave when I see him,” I said. “Maybe we can get IIT to at least offer a second course that uses C. Though if the economy follows the NASDAQ, we won’t be doing much hiring for the next few years.”

“You think it will?”

“That’s a good question. We’ve seen some of the knock-on effects.

“The Aeron chairs we got for a song?” Terry asked with a grin.

I nodded, “That was a pretty sweet deal Julia and Elyse worked out. But the Dow still looks good, so maybe it’ll just be the IT industry. Other than a bit of competition for the consulting and on-site support business, it really hasn’t affected us too much so far.”

“Let’s hope it stays that way.”

“Have you talked to Sam and Sherry?” I asked.

“You don’t have much time off scheduled until your trip to South America, right?”

“Just a trip to St. Martin and my annual checkup at Mayo Clinic. I’ll miss three days at the end of the month for St. Martin and then three days in August for Mayo.”

“OK. I’d like you to focus on this. Penny can finish the work the two of you have been doing.”

“By your command!” I replied in a faux metallic tone.

“Battlestar Galactica, right?”

“Yes. The boys and I watched the series recently because I read that Ron Moore has a project to do a new version.”

“Did you watch the second season?”

“Galactica: 1980? Only for the purpose of showing the boys how god-awful it was,” I replied. “It’s Godfather III and Star Trek V bad.”

“Yes, but is it Battlefield Earth bad?” he asked.

“I have no idea why you subjected yourself to that movie! I think Roger Ebert got it exactly right when he said it was like ‘taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It’s not merely bad; it’s unpleasant in a hostile way‘.”

“He was being kind,” Terry said, shaking his head. “Jon Stewart, on The Daily Show called it ‘a cross between Star Wars and the smell of ass‘.”

“Damn,” I said, laughing and shaking my head. “But L. Ron Hubbard was a hack writer, and Travolta lost his mind when he joined Scientology. Have you checked out the ‘Operation Clambake’ website?”

“Yeah. Holy shit, Boss!”

“Exactly. Anyway, I’ll get with Sam and Sherry. Do you want a top-to-bottom code review as part of this?”

“That’s up to Julia - I talked to her right before I came in. I suggested a code freeze, but that might impact Cindi’s deadlines, so we have to negotiate. That’s all I needed.”

He left and I went back to my desk. I checked my calendar, then sent a meeting invite to Sam and Sherry for Friday when all three of us had free time. I had just finished when a soft ‘ding’ announced a message. I brought gaim to the front and saw a message from Suzanne.

Petra1983: How are you??
NIKASteve: Good. You?
Petra1983: Ever wish you could be in church? 😀
NIKASteve: I don’t know of any church which has THAT sacrament!
Petra1983: I’m sure some cult in California does!
NIKASteve: David Berg’s group, The Family, used what they called ‘flirty fishing’ to get converts.
Petra1983: LOL! I bet it worked!
NIKASteve: It did. Before the AIDS epidemic, their records show over 200,000 male converts.
Petra1983: In your dreams! ;-)
NIKASteve: That might be a bit excessive.
Petra1983: I know you’re working; I just wanted to say ‘hi’.
NIKASteve: I may need to be in Colorado Springs on business in the next couple of weeks.
Petra1983: Let me know! I’ll find a way to see you.
NIKASteve: Will do!
Petra1983: L8r!
NIKASteve: L8r!

I went back into Outlook and saw that both Sam and Sherry had accepted the meeting invite, and that Liz had forwarded a copy of the lawsuit by EB Systems. I opened the PDF and began reading. I’d just finished reading the first claim when gaim, an alternative to the default AOL client I was testing, dinged again. Assuming it was Suzanne, I brought it to the foreground.

Bonita84: Hola! A/S/L?
NIKASteve: 37/M/Chicago. You?
Bonita84: 16/F/Buenos Aires. Found you in the directory. Looking for an American pen pal.
NIKASteve: FYI, I’m working, so might be interrupted.
Bonita84: Sorry!
NIKASteve: It’s OK.
Bonita84: Do you speak Spanish?
NIKASteve: Conversationally. Your English is good.
Bonita84: I can write it, but it is hard to speak. What do you do?
NIKASteve: I’m a computer programmer. You’re a student?
Bonita84: Yes. I want to study computers at University
NIKASteve: Cool!
Bonita84: Do you have any friends from Argentina?
NIKASteve: One; a doctor who works here in Chicago. She came to the US to study and stayed.
Bonita84: Your girlfriend?
NIKASteve: No. She’s married and has a kid. I met her through another doctor friend.
Bonita84: Are you married?
NIKASteve: Yes.
Bonita84: Is it OK to talk to a girl online?
NIKASteve: Yes. But I do need to go to lunch in a few minutes.
Bonita84: OK. I will chat with you later. OK?
NIKASteve: OK.

“ANOTHER girl?” Penny asked, leaning over to look at my screen.

“I was sitting here minding my own business!” I chuckled. “Kind of like when I was mowing the lawn seventeen years ago next month!”

“Oh, shut up!” Penny huffed, but then her voice softened. “You remember the day?”

“Of course! On August 5th, 1983, a cute blonde girl stuck her head over the fence and announced her name was Penny O’Neil, and it was very obvious she wanted to fuck the Walton’s lawn boy!”

“Oh, shut up!” Penny huffed again, but then she laughed. “But you’re right.”

“Obviously!” I chuckled. “You asked me if I had a girlfriend and then if I wanted one!”

“You’re going to Buenos Aires in October, right?”

“Yes, Penelope.”

She shook her head, “Unreal.”

“I need to read through this lawsuit and then head to lunch with Leigh.”

“It would be a lot easier if you just let me kill them.”

“Murder is bad for business,” I replied.

“You’re just no fun!”

I shook my head and went back to reading the claims, none of which I felt would hold up at trial, if we even got that far. The one key claim - fraudulent transfer of the copyright - really needed to be made against DCP, and they were not a party to the suit. It was possible they would be sued separately, but that case would have to be resolved before EB could have any chance to survive a motion to dismiss. When I finished, I let Kimmy know I was heading to lunch, but made a detour to my sister’s office.

“I read the claims. Did we call DCP to see if they were sued separately?”

“I asked Liz to do that.” Stephanie replied. “Their attorney hasn’t called back. You don’t know anyone there at this point, do you?”

I shook my head, “No. They canned Manny after the Lone Star fiasco, and he was really the only one I knew. Well, Brad, but he was with Lone Star at the time, even though he was DCP’s man. Those jokers are lucky to have avoided prison. Big fines and probation all because the statutes are so vague that it’s not clear the government could win.”

“Did anything jump out at you?”

“No. It’s all boilerplate, and as we discussed, the ‘fraudulent transfer of copyright’ claim will never survive a motion to dismiss without either a win against DCP or them being a named party. And without that claim, the rest of it goes away as ‘failure to state a claim’ because they have no basis in equity.”

“You’ve been spending WAY too much time fucking lawyers, big brother!”

I chuckled, “After being fucked by them in the non-literal sense for years, what else could I do? Changing subjects, did either Terry or Julia talk to you about coding issues?”

“Julia raised it in the Ops meeting on Monday morning. Since the code was never released; it’s an internal thing so she’s handling it. I take it you’re involved?”

“Terry came to talk to me earlier.”

“Is there an issue?”

“No. I was just wondering if you were aware.”

“I don’t interfere in Julia or Terry managing their teams any more than you did. How bad is it?”

“I won’t know until I actually look at the code, but I’d say the fact we caught the problems in QA is a good thing. But three memory management issues in less than two weeks concerns me. That’s not the kind of thing that’s happened before. Sure, we’ve had some nasty bugs in the past, but this is just sloppy.”

“You mean like not checking for negative numbers when validating the input for blood pressure?” Stephanie asked with a smirk.

“Penny still gives me shit about that from time to time,” I chuckled. “I need to get to lunch.”

“Who are you eating today?” she teased.

“Nobody! It’s just lunch.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Things are a bit different these days.”

“True. How are the mentoring sessions going with Leigh’s friends?”

“Just fine. They’re learning quickly and I have some good ideas for a computer club at Jesse’s High School. Once school starts, I’ll talk with the principal. I’m not sure how it works, but I suspect a teacher will need to be involved. That said, I may have to rethink my approach based on some things Terry said.”

“Oh?”

“That the kids coming out of college have bad habits from writing in VB or Java, which is likely what led to the kinds of issues we’re seeing with the C code.”

“Why is that?”

“Java, in its runtime, checks array bounds and pointer de-references, which C does not. So you can get completely undefined behavior from a C program where a Java program would halt with a runtime error. The C program will continue until something bad happens - use after free, buffer overflow, null pointer, or whatever, and it might be many, many instructions later where the fault occurs.

“There’s also the issue of ‘garbage collection’, which is part of the Java runtime, but which isn’t part of C. Basically, Java automatically cleans up memory that is no longer being used by the code, which C does not. If you don’t release the memory properly, then you get a memory leak. Or you can release it and then re-use it as I mentioned, creating a different problem.”

“And this ‘garbage collection’ solves the problem?”

“At a cost,” I replied. “First, it consumes resources. Second, it can lock the program while it occurs. Third, it allows for lazy programmers and can result in bloated code. For example, a programmer will know when they’re never going to use whatever is in memory, but the garbage collection routines can only take action if there are no remaining references. It’s a bit more complicated, but for this conversation, that will suffice.”

“So what do we do?”

“Code reviews and QA,” I replied. “Along with profiling system calls and memory usage.”

“Well, if you and Sam can’t figure out how to solve this, I doubt anyone can!”

“It’s an ongoing trade off,” I replied. “In our case, we’ve chosen C, well, C++, for performance and flexibility. But in some ways, it’s like working without a net because the fact that you can do pretty much anything means you can do pretty much anything!”

“I’ll leave that to you propellerheads!”

I chuckled, “You’re learning, Squirt!”

“I audited all kinds of firms, and there isn’t a single industry as bizarre as IT.”

“Which is why I love it,” I replied. “I need to get going.”

“See you!”

I left Stephanie’s office and headed to Takumi, which Leigh had requested. We met by the hostess stand and a few minutes later were seated in the Japanese room.

“How was Michigan?” she asked after we placed our orders.

“Awesome as always,” I replied. “Those nine days away every year are great. I’ve been lucky and we’ve never had a crisis at work that needed my attention while I was away. And now that my sister is running things, there’s even less risk. What have you done the last two weeks?”

“Mostly trying to wrap my head around the conversations we’ve had. They’re so unlike anything I’ve ever experienced! I really wish our teachers were like you.”

“As we discussed, parents would never put up with it.”

“What about college? Isn’t it better?”

“To a point, but even the colleges are being infected with the puritanism that infects society as a whole. It used to be just the administration - now it’s the professors and students. A friend of mine who was a sixties radical is appalled. His generation fought the administration for more freedom. Current students are fighting the administration to restrict freedom. The sixties radicals wanted free speech; the current activists want to stifle it.”

“Orwell?”

“We haven’t quite got to controlling thought by changing the language, but I could see that happening. We haven’t gotten around to disappearing people just yet, but we’ve seen that happen in the Soviet Union.”

“My history teacher showed us pictures of Stalin which had someone ‘erased’ because they had become an enemy of Stalin for some reason or other.”

“Which Orwell called an ‘unperson’. Fundamentally, the struggle is between those who believe in individual liberty and those who are control freaks. And the control freaks are winning by using ‘moral panic’ to scare the populace into voting for draconian laws which restrict individual liberty. The thing is, all the promises of ‘safety’ or ‘security’ are never fulfilled and all we do is lose freedom. As Ben Franklin said - ‘Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety‘.”

“So what is ‘essential’ liberty?”

“Well, in Franklin’s case, it wasn’t what most people would say today. He wrote that in 1756 when the Governor of Pennsylvania vetoed a bill which would have paid for frontier defense, but would have stressed reconciliation with the ‘Indian’ tribes in line with the Quaker sentiments of Pennsylvania Colony. The governor objected to the tax scheme on behalf of the Penn family, and also wanted a forceful response to the ‘Indians’. Per Franklin, the settlers on the frontier wanted reconciliation, and did not want to be forced into conflict.”

“That is NOT how I’ve heard that explained.”

“Yeah, well,” I chuckled. “That was the original context, but he himself used it again when he was part of a commission trying to negotiate with the King of England after the ‘Boston Tea Party’. In that context, he was talking about going to war rather than suffer further under the Coercive Acts. You probably heard them called the ‘Intolerable Acts’, but Franklin used the British term of art. Those acts took away the self-governance and the historic rights of Massachusetts, and basically led directly to Lexington and Concord. Franklin felt that the Colonies couldn’t yield to losing their traditional rights.”

“That’s more in line with what I understood. So, what are ‘essential’ liberties?”

“I’d say it boils down to some simple concepts - the right to be secure in my person, effects, and papers; the right to clear title to property and, within reason, do with it as I please; the right to engage in any consensual act that does not result in injury to another.”

“But couldn’t someone agree to be hurt or even killed?”

“Sure, but how do you judge consent in those cases? If I only hurt myself, then no problem. If I hurt another, it becomes difficult to separate consensual from non-consensual. I’m not saying you can’t do it; I’m saying you don’t have an unlimited right to do it. Consent can be a very tricky thing. There’s a significant difference between what you could call ‘positive’ consent and acquiescence. I can give an example, if you like.”

“Sure.”

We were interrupted as the waitress brought our food. After I gave the Japanese blessing, the conversation continued.

“Think about the following two scenarios - a couple agree to have sex, and do. That’s ‘positive consent’. The same guy and girl meet at a party, start making out, and he gets her so hot and bothered that she has sex with him. She never objects, fully participates, and enjoys it. She acquiesced, she didn’t give ‘positive’ consent.”

“Sure she did - she went along with everything without objecting!”

“Yes, she did. But that’s acquiescence, or perhaps ‘implied consent’. Think about why, if you’re a guy, that’s a bad idea.”