Editors' Blogs

There's an old saying that a classic symptom of insanity is doing the same thing again and again in the hope that the results will be different. Obviously the person who wrote that lived in the era before computers.

One of the interesting things about computers is that they are in fact deterministic machines -- if you do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way, it will always have exactly the same results. But what most people don't realize is that modern computers are actually hard at work all the time, even when you're not doing anything. Dozens of processes activate themselves and run and then shut off, and you never even see them. But if one such process is working when you do something and note the result, and later on you try again when that process is offline, your results could be different... and then you're left wondering if you're insane.

This is a vital part of debugging a computer-based music system... trying to minimize what's changed in the computer since everything was working just fine. And I'm seeing it a lot these days as I go through the usual motions of my online life and work.

I recently upgraded one of my music computers to Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), and following some advice I'd seen in reputable computer magazines and the experiences of several friends, I did so without clearing off my hard drive first and reinstalling all my apps. I just installed Snow Leopard under where Leopard used to be. Since then, I've been gently prodding at the new features added in Snow Leopard and liking a lot of them (scrollable Stack windows? Oh HECK yeah!), but for the first time since I've started using Mac OS X of any flavor (and I go all the way back to 10.1 Puma), I now have a regular background app crash problem. Something called PreferencesSyncClient keeps crashing on me and offering a log, again and again. It doesn't seem to affect anything I do, but it's annoying. Didn't used to happen... now it does.

I recently tried to order some books from a small-press publisher, and was informed by their online store that they weren't able to connect to their bank data server and would I please try again later? So I did... multiple times... always without success. I wrote a letter. Then another, and another. I was told that my letters were mailed, but I never got an answer. Finally in desperation I wrote to one of the authors whose books I was trying to buy, and said, "What's the matter with your online vendor? Do they not want to talk to me about this?" He wrote to them on my behalf and I got a very apologetic letter an hour later, which basically said, "We're very sorry... not only did we never get any of your letters, but we've confirmed what you saw on our site, and we have no idea how much holiday business we've lost because people haven't been able to place orders and we haven't seen their complaints!" Apparently the vendor site was working fine just the other day.... 

And finally, when I logged onto our web server to write this blog, I was confronted with a dropdown authentication request that refused every password I gave it. I remembered Lorenz complaining about it the other day, and had no idea at the time what he was talking about... and now it was bugging me. I eventually clicked Cancel and it went away... I was able to log on the usual way... and now I get that dropdown back every time I change web pages in the site administration system, and have to Cancel it every time. Our site still works great and the back end lets us do all we need to do... but somewhere in the past week, it's started asking for an extra and unneccessary authentication. It didn't used to do that...?

And so the battle goes on. If you try something the same way twice and get two different results, you might be insane... but check your computer first. Happy holidays!