I try to write columns around coherent themes. After a while, the number of interesting items that just didn't fit into recent columns grows to the point where I need to try to make a theme out of no theme.
This month I talk about a cautionary article, algorithms, Windows, Linux, programming utilities, and an authoring tool.
Bill Joy's Warning
In the April 2000 issue of Wired Magazine, Bill Joy, inventor of the vi editor and a whole lot more since then, calls on his fellow technologists to consider the ethical implications and possible dangers of their work.
New technology has often had bad side effects. The early nineteenth century Luddites fought the Industrial Revolution, because it did so much immediate harm. The Luddites lost, but the side effects of the Industrial Revolution were fortunately not fatal to the society at large. In time, society sorted out the problems, and the benefits soon outweighed them.
Humanity, so far, has muddled through the problems of technological change. But technology is becoming more powerful, more potentially destructive, and more widely accessible. The chance that humanity will survive its side effects, accidental consequences, or malicious misuse, drops from the near certainty of the past to a lower, more frightening, level.
Joy begins by quoting at length a plausible but exaggerated and slightly hysterical passage from the Unabomber Manifesto of technologist-turned-murderer, Ted Kaczinski. Kaczinski makes good points, but I can easily see the flaws. I don't worry that we will all become slaves of robots.
Joy's approach, by contrast, is quiet, understated, well reasoned. He looks at three technologies in which our progress is quickly outpacing our ability to control them: genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. He calls attention to some of the possible consequences of these technologies -- plague, intelligent germ warfare, out-of-control self-replicating robots, and many others. Some of the consequences seem highly unlikely, others very likely. Many are potentially catastrophic, perhaps fatal to humanity.
Then Joy says, "OK, what do you think about it?" That's his whole point: think about it.
Most people react to an article like this by worrying about it for a little while, then putting it out of their minds. We all have more immediate problems. We want somebody else to figure it out. We've always muddled through.
Joy is right. There are real dangers and not enough public concern. He has taken these matters to scientific and other associations, but without much success. I agree with him that we need to consider the ethical implications of what we do. But even more than that, whether we're personally involved in these technologies or not, we must all learn more and think more about how to preserve, protect, and defend ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our planet.
I have heard Joy say in interviews that he will soon establish a means for people concerned about these issues to communicate and to become involved. Watch for it.
Algorithms
The Advent of the Algorithm--The Idea That Rules the World by David Berlinski (Harcourt, NY, 2000, 366pp, ISBN 0-15-100338-6, $28.00)
Math historians see David Berlinski's work the way political historians see Edmund Morris's memoir of Ronald Reagan, Dutch (Random House, 1999). They respect it as a work of art, but as history they see it as a lost opportunity.
Berlinski moves easily between fact and fiction, between scientific exposition and impressionistic evocations of the time, place, and human context of that science. He sketches a set of mathematical and philosophical trends and builds them into a coherent theme. The theme may be oversimplified, but much of it rings true.
An algorithm, according to Berlinski is
a finite procedure,written in a fixed symbolic vocabulary,governed by precise instructions,moving in discrete steps, 1, 2, 3, . . .,whose execution requires no insight, cleverness, intuition, intelligence, or perspicacity,and that sooner or later comes to an end.
We all know this, but Berlinski contrasts it with the calculus (the subject of a companion book). Calculus is the basis of mathematical physics. Its continuous variables correspond directly to the real world. Its laws need no further interpretation. Physics, according to Berlinski, seeks to trace everything to final laws, which physicists discover but do not create, and historical accidents. Algorithms, on the other hand, embody intention. They manipulate symbols, which someone must then interpret, in a sequence of steps that represent a design and a purpose.
If this is so, then where does the interpretation of the genetic code fit in? Where is the design and purpose? These are the kinds of questions Berlinski attacks after he finishes his basic narrative.
In Berlinski's view, the basic history of the algorithm (like a two-minute summary of Hamlet) is as follows.
Leibnitz devised the idea of reducing thinking to manipulating symbols for a finite library of discrete concepts. Later, Peano established axioms for arithmetic, Frege incorporated them into the predicate calculus, and Gödel, in proving his incompleteness theorem, defined the class of primitive recursive functions. Shortly afterward, Church invented lambda-calculus, Turing invented his machine, and all three formulations, as well as a similar one from Post, turned out to be equivalent.
Berlinski goes into somewhat greater detail than this, and if you read the book, you can get a good sense of the essence of all of this work. Unfortunately, the book suffers from careless editing and proofreading, which can make it harder to understand such terse formulations as Church's lambda calculus.
Berlinski intersperses little stories within the narrative. They are imaginary dialogs, sometimes involving him, or brief stories that resonate in some way with the text. At one point Berlinski talks about complexity by comparing Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. A Pollock painting is complex because the only way to describe it is to point to it.
In some ways this book is simple, but in other ways it's complex. You just have to look at it for yourself. If you're interested in computers and modern thought, I think you'll find the book worth reading.
The Firewall
Earlier this year (Micro Review, March/April 2000) I wrote about Windows 2000 Server and my attempts to use a personal firewall from Zonelabs.com of San Francisco. I don't know where the fault lies, because I often install software that's not quite ready for prime time, but after a while my Windows 2000 system became completely unstable, so I reinstalled from the CD that Microsoft had sent me. In the interests of stability, I did not reinstall the personal firewall, because it was not certified to run on Windows 2000 Server.
My new configuration is stable, but it needs some sort of security, so I decided to set up a Linux firewall on a separate machine. Another benefit of the Linux machine, I reasoned, is that it can allow me to route Internet traffic for all of the machines on my network, even when one of them is connected to a corporate intranet via virtual private networking (VPN). I had this capability on the Windows system before I reinstalled Windows 2000 Server, but I have not been able to make it work since the reinstallation. Despite the fact that my old and new configurations both identify themselves as Build 2195, the reinstalled version seems to handle VPN and routing completely differently from the way the original version did.
In recent years I have worked almost exclusively with Windows systems, so I decided to ask a friend for help setting up Linux. It went smoothly enough, but it was like a blast from the past. My conscious mind cannot tell you how to operate the vi editor, but my fingers, perversely, deftly execute the arcane commands for inserting text, replacing characters, and so forth.
Quickly, the great benefits and the evident drawbacks of Linux sprang into view. I found a surplus machine (Pentium, 166MHz) that is more than adequate for Linux. To use it as a firewall, I installed a second Ethernet card (an old 10MBit one) to connect to the digital subscriber line (DSL) modem. Figuring out how to set the jumpers for IRQ and memory mapped I/O went smoothly enough. A Linux command produced a list of devices and the resources they use. IRQ 10 and memory address range 300-31F (hex) showed up as unused, so we assigned them to the Ethernet card.
This all went smoothly, but then Linux began to crash horribly. After a while we determined that the crash occurred every time we touched the mouse. Carefully avoiding the mouse, we prowled around the Linux sources and discovered that the mouse driver uses the same I/O addresses we assigned to the Ethernet card. The mouse driver, probably because it predates the facility, fails to register its IRQ and I/O addresses with the Linux command that produces the list of devices and resources. We moved the Ethernet card's I/O address block to 320 (hex), and now everything works.
Because we could look at the sources, we were able to correct the problem. Because nobody is responsible, there is no easy way to prevent other people from having the same problem. The fundamental benefits and drawbacks of Linux, side by side.
With the second Ethernet card working properly, it was easy to set up IP masquerading, the facility by which the firewall machine routes Internet traffic for the local network. The next steps, still to come, are
Configuring the firewall for the right balance between security and convenience.Enabling the firewall to route VPN traffic.
In future columns I'll report on those projects. [Postscript (November 2008): I never got these features to work, but I finally managed to get the Windows networking to work.]
In the course of working on the Linux and Windows systems described above, I was extremely pleased at the ease and reliability with which I was able to manipulate disk partitions using PartitionMagic from PowerQuest (www.powerquest.com). I'm not elaborating on the details, because I know they have released another version since they sent me my copy, but if you need to add, remove, resize, or perform a variety of other operations on disk partitions, you should take a look at PartitionMagic.
Programming Utilities
I have reported on the Visual SlickEdit editor and the MKS Toolkit in past columns. Both of these programming tools are highly regarded throughout the industry. Visual SlickEdit is a cross-platform programmer's editor. MKS Toolkit makes Unix commands and tools available in the Windows environment. Both are recently out in new versions.
Visual SlickEdit, version 5, MicroEdge, Apex, NC, www.slickedit.com, $275.00.
Visual SlickEdit for Linux is the first program I installed on my Linux system. It wasn't difficult, but it was a lot trickier than a Windows installation. It was wonderful to see its familiar screen in that programmer-friendly but user-hostile environment.
I've praised Visual SlickEdit highly in the past, but the new version is even more impressive. I don't do enough programming to use all of its features, but I recently used some of its new features when I had to publish printed versions of a set of Java classes. Java sources in electronic form tend to use vertical space lavishly, which can spread them out over several pages, making them hard to read. Reformatting them by hand can lead to errors, so I used the Visual SlickEdit code beautifier to do most of the job for me. The beautifier gives you a choice of styles, and, as with everything else in Visual SlickEdit, if you don't like the available choices, you can write your own in MicroEdge's macro language, Slick C.
While testing my new versions of the code, I realized that I must not have started from the latest version of the sources. I had to compare the old and new versions to see what I would have to change. Visual SlickEdit provides an amazing tool for doing this. It's called DIFFzilla, and while it's a little hard to figure out what the controls do, the side-by-side views it presents are awe-inspiring in their clarity and accuracy.
I didn't need to merge changes, but Visual SlickEdit does that even more smoothly now than it did in earlier versions. It also handles braces (curly brackets) more intelligently than it used to.
Previous versions of Visual SlickEdit had context tagging, a feature that allows the editor to give you language-specific help while you're entering a program. The current version improves on this with support for HTML, Cobol, Ada, and Delphi. It also provides support for displaying and editing Javadocs, the Java facility for embedding documentation into source programs.
If you're a current Visual SlickEdit user, the new features are well worth the upgrade price. If you don't have a powerful programmer's editor, rush out and get Visual SlickEdit. It will do wonders for your productivity.
MKS Toolkit, Mortice-Kern Systems, Waterloo, Ontario, www.mks.com, $400 - $2500.
Since I first reviewed this product (in 1992), it has matured and grown, and its marketing has become much more sophisticated. Its basic focus, however, remains the same: give programmers working in a Microsoft environment the same powerful programming tools that Unix programmers take for granted.
The product now comes in a variety of versions -- from the simplest package for a single developer to complete support for cross-platform, web-enabled enterprise development. The high end products are pricey, so be sure you know what you're buying, and why, if you take that route. I don't have enough experience with the high-end products to make a recommendation.
The basic developer tools, however, are essential productivity enhancers for any Windows programmer. If you're a current user, take a look at the new versions to see if they offer anything important that you're not getting now. If you're not a current user, you need to get MKS Toolkit and learn how to use it. It will pay off for you in the long run.
FrameMaker 6
FrameMaker is the leading tool, at least in and around the Silicon Valley, for producing printed hardware and software manuals. FrameMaker was not originally an Adobe product. They acquired it a few years ago, and for the last year or so FrameMaker users have worried that Adobe was letting it die. The recent appearance of FrameMaker 6, and its cousin FrameMaker Plus SGML 6, has quelled those worries for now.
FrameMaker 6 and FrameMaker Plus SGML 6, Adobe, San Jose, CA, www.adobe.com, $849 and $1449.
These new versions are not vastly different from the 5.5 versions. The biggest story is that they came out at all, given the doubts in the FrameMaker community about Adobe's commitment to the product.
While there are no big differences, there are a number of important improvements. The first is a greatly improved book mechanism. In the new version, the book file controls the structure more cleanly and closely, and there are many book-wide features -- like search and replace -- that you had to do one file at a time in the old version. The new version now supports the notion of a collection of books, and you can set volume, chapter, and page numbering in the book file. You can now specify a chapter's number as "continue from previous," so that you need not specify chapter numbers explicitly. This makes it easier to rearrange the chapters of a book or to share a chapter between two books.
FrameMaker 6 simplifies the process of including chapter numbers in table, figure, and page numbers. The chapnum variable replaces a complex scheme based on paragraph numbering.
Another problem with the old version was the inadequate mechanism for generating HTML from FrameMaker files. Rather than trying to improve this mechanism, Adobe has dropped it entirely and now bundles a version of Quadralay's WebWorks Publisher with FrameMaker. WebWorks Publisher handles this task extremely well.
The FrameMaker Plus SGML product is just like FrameMaker in most respects, but it facilitates generating SGML (or XML) documents. Rather than tagging with paragraph and character formats (you still can, if you like), you apply tags that show the element's place in the document structure.
If you are upgrading from FrameMaker 5.5 and you have any interest in generating XML documents, consider upgrading to FrameMaker Plus SGML 6. Adobe charges the same amount for an upgrade to FrameMaker Plus SGML 6, whether you are upgrading from FrameMaker 5.5 or FrameMaker Plus SGML 5.5.
FrameMaker is still the standard for large printed manuals, and with version 6, it looks like it will continue to be the standard for some time to come.
