The Hindu Business Line : All bugs are not equal

Donald Knuth's famous quote is that software is hard. But "why is good software so hard to make?" asks Scott Rosenberg in Dreaming in Code, from Crown Publishers (www.crownpublishing.com) .

He sets about to find an answer to his question, by tracking over three years `a group of men and women - led by Lotus 1-2-3 creator Mitch Kapor - who are developing a novel PIM or personal information manager named Chandler (as in Raymond) meant to challenge market-leader Microsoft Outlook with elegant innovations... '

Time really does seem to behave differently around the act of making software, feels Rosenberg. "When things go well, you can lose track of passing hours in the state psychologists call `flow'. When things go badly, you get stuck, frozen between dimensions, unable to move or see a way forward." This is software time, he quips.

How hard software can be is first learnt through the mandatory `Hello World' program that every novice has to cut his teeth with. The program, as you may know, is "a bit of code that successfully conjures the computer's voice and orders it to greet its master by typing these words," as a cheerful exercise in ventriloquism!

The book gives the `Hello' code in Java, `one of the workhorse programming languages in today's business world', beginning with the `class' line. Following it is the phrase `public static void', a cryptic sequence that is found in gazillions of chunks of program code written in Java, as the author notes.

"The words carry specific technical meaning. But I've always heard them as a bit of machine poetry, evoking the desolate limbo where software projects that begin with high spirits too often end up."

Bjarne Stroustrup, who invented C++ once said, "Our civilisation runs on software." Citing this, Rosenberg says that never in history have we depended so completely on a product that so few know how to make well. "There is a big and sometimes frightening gap between our accelerating dependence on software systems and the steady but slow progress in our knowledge of how to make them soundly. The dependence has increased exponentially, while the skill - and the will to apply it - advances only along a plodding line."

The author takes us back to July 2003, for a stroll into Chandlerville, in a chapter titled `Doomed'. We run into Michael Toy, the manager, conducting a meeting. He has long lists, not the `shopping' one but of bugs, `rosters of unsolved or open problems or flaws'. These bug lists live inside a program called Bugzilla!

All bugs are not equal, please note. For instance, bug number 44 in Bugzilla was about `flicker free window display when resizing windows'. An aesthetic offence? No, a thorny problem, discovers the team, because `it isn't simply a matter of fixing code'; the roots lie in `a body of software called wxWidgets that the Chandler team has adopted as one of the building blocks of their project.'

The meeting agrees upon a decision: "Bugs that have a black hole-like quality - bugs that you couldn't even begin to say for sure how long they would take to fix - would be tagged in Bugzilla with a special warning label." Scary? Well, that's how Toy tags bug number 44...

Unputdownable.

Capacious definition of telegraph

A turning point in the evolution of law about telecom was the Edison Telephone case of 1880, in London.

In the fast-changing telecom scene, there is a legacy that functions as a principal pillar of the regulatory framework: The Indian Telegraph Act, 1885. "This quaint statute was passed when Victoria was still the Empress of India and electric telegraphs were the principal means of electronic communication," writes Vikram Raghavan in Communications Law in India, from LexisNexis Butterworths (www.lexisnexis.co.in) .

"The statute's legal rules and regulatory provisions are organised around the concept of a telegraph." The word telegraph is capaciously defined in the Act, notes the author. "This definition wraps within it most modern forms of communications, including landline telephones, cellular services, satellite radio, and the Internet."

Section 3(1AA) defines the word telegraph to mean, "... any appliance, instrument, material or apparatus used or capable of use for transmission or reception of signs, signals, writing, images, and sounds or intelligence of any nature by wire, visual, or other electro-magnetic emissions, radio waves or Hertzian waves, galvanic, electric, or magnetic waves."

A wide enough definition that includes most modern communication devices irrespective of their underlying technology, explains Raghavan. He cites judicial decisions that have held `telegraph' to include telephone, television, video equipment, different types of radio and wireless.

Section 4(1) states that the Central Government has the exclusive privilege of establishing, maintaining, and working telegraphs within India, and this is the provision that enables the Government to exercise complete control over all telegraphs within the country.

"A proviso to Section 4(1) authorises the government to part with its privilege by granting a licence to operate a telegraph."

A turning point in the evolution of law about telecom was the Edison Telephone case of 1880, in London. Telephone, the American invention, quickly reached England and was becoming popular. "Private companies began telephone services after obtaining patents from Bell and Edison.

Within a few years, thousands of subscribers had signed up for a telephone connection," narrates Raghavan. Initially, the Postmaster General did not consider telephone services a great threat. "It was believed that only the rich could afford a telephone and the public would not use the invention... There was a sudden spike in private telephone services and this development alarmed the government."

Fearing a threat to its legal monopoly over telegraphic communications, under the 1869 English telegraph statute, the government sued private telephone operators. Edison Telephone Co argued that the Act had been enacted prior to the telephone's invention, and so the statute did not apply to the telephone. Sounds logical, but the High Court of England ruled that telephone operation fell within `the Postmaster General's exclusive privilege of transmitting telegrams'.

Justice Stephen who rejected the company's contention reasoned thus: "Of course, no one supposed that the legislature intended to refer specifically to telephones many years before they were invented, but it is highly probable that they would, and it seems to us clear that they actually did use language embracing future discoveries as to the use of electricity for the purposes of conveying intelligence."

He even noted that a telegraph could even include a device that transmitted signals through the air, `if such a thing were possible.'

Prophetic, points out Raghavan. The judge's remark proved to be a remarkable prediction, as there was no wireless technology used in communications when Edison Telephone case was decided, observes the author.

Closer home, by 1900, the telegraph network grew to more than 60,000 km of wires with more than 1,600 telegraph offices, as Radhe Shyam Rungta would chronicle in The Rise of Business Corporations in India 1851-1900.

Essential reference.

Tailpiece

"Do you know how a fight between bugs begins?"

"With one calling the other, `Dey bug!'"