mahiwaga

I am still waiting for the veritable hammer to fall. I can only expect that it will happen exactly when I’m least expecting it.

I’m not sure what I’m trying to do any more. Friendship is all well and dandy, but no matter how close you are, it will always be eventually eclipsed by romance.

You’ll find that your best friend ain’t quite as available. It’s bad enough when you’re both guys (and both straight.) When there’s a gender mismatch and/or the remotest possibility that someone is harboring unrequited tendencies, every complication seems to get magnified.

I kind of wonder just how many times I’ll need to go down this road in my lifetime. At the very least, it will be a finite number.

The other day I found myself asking myself if it would still be worth going on and living if I knew that this was the best it was gonna get, that’s all there is, there ain’t no mo’. Considering all the sorts of (often self-inflicted) emotional torture I’ve gone through in the past decade or so, I would think that anything would be bearable at this stage. That which doesn’t kill you only delays the inevitable. But the thought of waking up to this loneliness every single day for the rest of my natural life sort of made me hesitate. If I had some sort of time machine and knew that this was going to be my destiny, I think I might be hard-pressed to keep going.

I just realized that there are a couple of things that Radiant, specifically comments, which is not that big of a deal since no one ever really commented on previous blogs anyway except for spammers, and there are plenty of services that can fill the void, such as Haloscan and Disqus. 

But the real deal breaker was the fact that I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the cruft in the URI. Radiant defaults to posting articles as http://domain.tld/articles/yyyy/mm/dd/slug, when all I ever want is http://domain.tld/yyyy/mm/dd/slug. Being a little more familiar with REST, I can now begin to see the logic in adding something like ‘articles’ to the URI, but I’m still not sold on it. The yyyy/mm/dd part should be sufficient, really. 

Ironically, this was one of the minor annoyances I had with Typo the last time I used it although you could always kludge around it. 

Never the less, I find myself reinstalling Typo, now up to version 5.0.3, although trunk seems to be running reasonably well.

People shouldn’t be mucking around with software release terminology. I just read Rob Diana’s rant about the abuse of the term “beta” on the Internet on Mashable! and the terms really shouldn’t be as fungible as that.

The quick and dirty:

• alpha: Build and runs. Barely. Show-stopper bugs common. Sometimes runnable, but doesn’t actually do anything.
• beta: Functional software but buggy.
• gamma: Ready to go gold. Probably still has some insidious bugs that haven’t been ferreted out yet. Also commonly referred to as a “release candidate”

Anything beyond that is unnecessary. Delta is more commonly used to refer to quick bug fixes of already released software, sometimes synonymous with the z version in x.y.z terminology, since deltas are commonly associated with patches. Any other use of delta is confusing. Omega is, I suppose, equivalent to final release, but that’s also probably unnecessary.

As far as I can tell, just because it’s Web 2.0 doesn’t mean these definitions don’t apply. Releasing real alpha software as an accessible service is really asking for trouble. If there’s a showstopper in there that’s going to need an architectural change, you’re either going to have to jump through hoops to preserve your alpha-testers’ data, or you give them the finger and tell them “I told you it was an alpha!” On the other hand, I think it’s legitimate for Google to continue calling Gmail beta, because there may very well be some insidious bug lying in their code base just waiting for the critical mass of users and data to nuke everyone’s Inbox. That’s the problem with networked systems: you can’t easily trace all the paths through your code without actually releasing it to the real world. Most of the bugs tend to be related to (1) data volume (2) traffic volume (3) unintended/unforeseen interactions between components.

Somewhat humorously, medicine has a similar release cycle for pharmaceuticals:

• preclinical:
  • pharmacodynamics: figuring out what the drug does to the body
  • pharmacokinetics: figuring out what the body does to the drug
    • absorption
    • distribution
    • metabolism
    • elimination
  • toxicity
• phase I: small trial on (usually) health subjects; pretty equivalent to alpha release software. You’re mostly sure that it won’t kill anyone, but you don’t know whether it will actually do anything, and you could still do some harm.
• phase II: larger trial that includes target subjects. Beta release. No obvious show-stoppers (i.e., instantaneous death), but lots of insidious side-effects. Actuall efficacy is tested. (Is the drug actually functional?)
• phase III: large, ideally, randomized clinical trial designed to test the new drug against the current standard of care. Release candidate: it actually does something, what it does is desirable, and no one has died. Even if the drug isn’t better than the current standard of care, if they can at least demonstrate non-inferiority, they can still go gold.

They now have a phase 0 designation, but this is almost like animal testing on humans, really, from what I can tell.