Order in Chaos

The Signature.

Yup, that’s it. It’s the worst security implement that mankind has ever invented. Worse than the secret handshake, worse than the ‘mother’s maiden name’, and worse than the easily picked old-school locks.

I’ve always thought this – but what finally pushed me over the edge was when I was at the bank today. I deposited one check. I put the check amount on the deposit slip, but forgot to put it in the ‘total’ at the bottom. So the teller filled it in and handed the slip back to me to initial. I thought to myself “initialing here does absolutely jack squat”. I obliged, of course. After all, I do want the money to find its way into my account.

But let’s go back to the idea in general. In technology, consumers want “perfect” security. They want a computer that’s “hacker proof, virus proof, and worm proof”. I know people who won’t purchase anything on sites like Amazon.com for fear of identity theft -”you never know who’s going to take your credit card number, boy… once it’s out there…it’s out there”. Yet, these same people use their credit card at a grocery store and are comfortable with the notion that their signature guarantees it was was a legitimate purchase. What’s even worse than real signatures are the signatures on those digital pads – they all look like absolute chicken scratch. What good does that really do, aside from meet some legal demand somewhere?

Yes, I’ve heard “well, ‘they’ can do handwriting analysis to see if it was really you”. I’m sure ‘they’ can, but how often will things go that far? What if it was a rubber-stamped or digital signature? What if it was legitimately me, but I had [accidentally] slammed my hand in the car door before coming into the store?

But signatures are not limited to bank deposit slips and credit card purchases. We use them every where, in all sorts of really important documents. How, in our modern world, is this still acceptable? In some cases, we need something better. In other cases – can we just forgo the whole thing all together?

I’ve always been a fan of Peter Gabriel’s “The Tower That Ate People”. I’m also a fan of dystopian-orwellian stories. While stumbling around on youtube I came accross this mashup of the 1927 silent film Metropolis. I’m pretty excited. I gotta go find a copy of this movie to watch now!

Yeah, we all pretty much agree, aviation checklists are good. It’s reasonable, it’s smart, it just plain makes sense. Conversely, most of us have seen Office Space (or, we got that memo) and agree that, never mind TPS reports themselves, TPS Cover Sheets are stupid mindless paperwork keeping us from just gettin’ on with our jobs! Most people probably have not actually dealt with a TPS Report, per se, but we’re familiar with the metaphor – stupid worthless paperwork.

So what am I getting at? Aviation Checklists and TPS Report Cover Sheets are really the same thing.

Aviation Checklist (Yup, there’s an App for that!)	TPR Report Cover Sheet (did you get that memo?)

The purpose of the aviation check list is pretty straight forward. To keep you un-deadified.The purpose of the TPS Cover is a little more convoluted, but it’s essentially a management checklist.

So how did the aviation checklist come into being? Did someone, one day, say for no reason “Let’s have a checklist. Yeah!”. No. First, somebody messed up. Bad. Then, people got together and had a meeting to discuss what went wrong and how to solve the problem.

A similar history lies behind much “mindless” paperwork similar to TPS Covers. A young or growing company, without the proper process or individual accountability, can turn a team of young, energetic, and enthusiastic recent college grads into a collection of sleep-deprived jaded suicidal alcoholics in mere days. After one, or more, projects have missed deadlines horribly, a meeting is called. In that meeting it’s asked “Why was the project so late? The original time line still looks reasonable – something went wrong. How can we fix this?”. The answer is often more process, more checklists, more paperwork.

So, TPS Cover Sheets are the end result of a project (or three) gone wrong. As much as a pain as they may be, they may actually be saving you from being driven into a jaded state of suicidal alcoholism. Conversely, there’s definitely the possibility that too much process and paperwork comes out of the meeting – perhaps an email to an email list for a memo for the coversheet for the tps report, which is ultimately for the test process for the actual product. There’s obviously a balance, but TPS Report Cover Sheets are probably not as bad as Peter Gibbons would have you believe. In the end – Damn, it feels good to be a gansta.

So I’ve spent the past couple nights drinking herbal tea and brushing up on my database design principles. I’m slightly ashamed to say that I never even touched databases in college. The entirety of my SQL/Database skillz come from “the field”. However, now that I’m once again on the job market, I figure it’s probably a good idea to brush up on things like design theory terminology, such as “first normal form”.

Something that I’m noticing is that I’m completely ignorant of some of these terms, but the concepts already are very close to my heart. Take, for example, the above mentioned first normal form.

A table of the first normal form 1) has columns that contain only atomic values and 2) has no repeating groups. What? Okay, atomic forms – another term I’m unfamiliar with. Repeating groups? What’s a group – do you mean no repeating rows? I don’t know… I’m confused. After digging in (i.e. reading down the page of my book where the example was illustrated with a picture), it all made sense.

Atomicity: Atomic values are values that are perceived to be broken down as much as reasonably possible. For example, names in the database in the a single columns “Firstname Lastname” are not atomic, while having a column “Firstname” and second column “Lastname” is atomic. Obviously, you can break it down more (by letter), but that’s unreasonable.

Repeating Groups:  An example of a repeating group would be the case where you have a table, listing Book-Id, Book-Title, and Authors, where you have the columns [BookId], [BookTitle], [Author1], [Author2], [Author3]. The repeating groups are the 3 author columns.

After I came to understand what was being said in the definition of the first normal form, I thought “What a waste of my time. This is so painfully obvious!” I mean, from my “field” learnings, I can testify to how painful it is to deal with non-atomic columns and repeating groups. I felt like this definition was analogous to having a section in the auto-manual that stated “It it good practice, when temperatures fall below freezing, to utilize your vehicle’s atmospheric-entropy-elevator, or aee device, to maintain the homeostatic environment of the vehicle“. I mean, have you ever actually tried to deal with a database with a single name column where some names have been entered as “FirstName, LastName”, others as “LastName, FirstName”, others as “FirstName MiddleName LastName”, and even “LastName, MiddleName1, MiddleName2, MiddleName3, FirstName, Junior/Senior”? [..oh God, bad memories flashing back...]

Now, this is a cynical outlook; it’s actually quite good for me to revisit these concepts in formal and academic style. I’m curious how many other people fall into this boat with me, and how our applications will vary from those of people with more formal database backgrounds.

In my random googlings, I stumbled upon this: Ten Common Database Design Mistakes.  Most of these seemed pretty “common sense” to me, but I thought it was excellent to see them laid out in text.

Database From Hell, via teejayhanton on Flickr. "this was at my old job. it was a database brought to me from a government agency (unclassified). my task was to a) sort it out and b) create a web application that would plug into it."

Here are a couple of perfect examples of the interesting, and often unintuitive, relationship that may exist between order and chaos.

Blocking Fire Exits? Researchers in Tokyo have noticed that an obstruction, such as a pole, strategically set approximately 30 degrees to either side of an emergency exit actually increases the rate at which people escape a certain and fiery death. via  physicscentral.com

Bad Drivers are Good? We’ve all been frustrated (to say the least) with bad drivers on the road. New research suggests that a certain percentage of drivers who break the rules actually increases traffic flow. The idea is basically that if everyone follows the rules, we clump together and actually get in each others way.  Having a few bad drivers (roughly 40%) breaks up the flow of drivers following the rules, like a cheetah cutting through a herd of gazelles (video below).  also via physicscentral.com

Okay, so it’s not a cheetah or gazelles. It’s me chasing sheep on a camping trip.