Slashdot Mirror
The Bug by Ellen Ullman
Never Rock Fila writes "On the front page of tomorrow's New York Times Book Review, a slightly breathless but overdue enthusiastic review of Ellen Ullman's new novel, The Bug. The review acknowledges that 'Ullman has already established herself as an indispensable voice out of the world of technology' -- if you haven't read her first book, a memoir, Close to the Machine, read that too -- and it's nice to see a mainstream publication like the Times, the gold standard of book reviews as I understand it, giving such prominent and positive attention to a novel by a former 'software engineer' that's all about getting inside the mind of a programmer, even concluding 'If more contemporary novels delivered news this relevant and wise they'd have to stop declaring the death of the novel.' The reviewer, one Benjamin Anastas, has the chops to develop a sustained comparison to Mary Shelley, to legitimately place the 1984 computer programmers at the center of the novel among 'all the best characters in fiction,' and to declare the book 'thrilling and intellectually fearless.'"
Those skits were hilarious, and it's even where the Simpsons got their start. Catch it in reruns if you can.
First Cryptonomicon hits the best-seller lists, now a paper does a favorable review of a novel about a geek.
Either us geeks are buying more books, or the mainstream population is getting brighter. Somehow, I think it's the former. American Idol is still on television.
Huh?
Sometimes you're the bug.
If you get a chance, read Ellen Ulman's article Programming the Post-Human - Computer Science redefines life. It was an excellent and realistic look at the current state of AI development. It was found in the October 2002 issue of Harper's Magazine. (I couldn't find an online copy) I'll have to think about picking up this book now, I thought her writing was superb.
Random is the New Order.
Salon.com loves Ellen Ullman almost as much as I do. Read excerpts from The Bug here: http://archive.salon.com/books/int/2003/05/16/ullm an/index_np.html
You can read articles by Ullman here:
http://archive.salon.com/directory/topics/ellen_ul lman/
Salon is free as long as you watch a little commercial (C'mon--its 10 secondds, and then you get to read Ulllman--for free!!!)
"Oh, the tragedy of math gone wrong. I can't even talk about it." -Wil Wheaton http://www.wilwheaton.net
How come everybody always posts these broken links that require registration? Why can't they link to, say, the Google partner URL or some such? Is this some kind of unwritten rule? Or do the Slashdot editors make sure to find the registration-required URLs? I always see replies with "no reg link", etc. Why don't the original authors use these?
i was like...Ellen Feiss made a bug? then like...bleep....what? ullman? and i was like..huh?
I hear that the bug got squashed and didn't make the best sellers list! But on a more serious note, that will make a very good read. Im glad someone finaly went to the trouble to write a book about the stuff I do everyday! also maybe it will get programmers some more respect. The sterotype of a pale loser breaking out with zits is getting on my nerves! But oh well I cant say anything about it really, I have not read it yet.
"...and it's nice to see a mainstream publication like the Times, the gold standard of book reviews as I understand it..."
I thought Oprah's book club was?
Finished this a few weeks ago after reading the sample of it Salon had posted. A very solid book, and the technical stuff was pretty solid as far as compiler interaction and such. It doesn't paint a rosey picture of life as a programmer though, and made me glad I got out of CSCI when I did...
Computer Science Crime Investigations?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
FYI, Palm Digital Media has Ms. Ullman's tome available for the Palm Reader.
I've read the review, it suck. Here it is
Welcome to The New York Times on the Web!
For full access to our site, please complete this simple registration form.
As a member, you'll enjoy:
In-depth coverage and analysis of news events from The New York Times FREE
Up-to-the-minute breaking news and developing stories FREE
Exclusive Web-only features, classifieds, tools, multimedia and much, much more FREE
Signing up is as easy as 1-2-3
Thanks for review NYTimes. Here's one book I won't buy : it's all about internet junk !
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
A little offtopic, but I'd like to see book links point to somewhere else, like Barnes & Noble. After all the coverage on /. of the amazon.com patents I thought this would have been obvious. Let's not support software patents and shop somewhere else instead. Here are the B&N links:
The Bug
Close to the Machine
Developers: We can use your help.
I was tricked (in retrospect) into reading "Close to the Machine" by a fellow graduate student who similarly cheerleaded for the tech-informed literary prowess of Ms. Ullman. I was sorely dissapointed by that outing (was I expecting too much? I doubt it). The problem was that "Close to the Machine" was a good literary effort when measured with the but-I-am-a-programmer stick and a bad book when measure with the a-book-is-just-a-book stick. I hope that this book is better, but I'll wait for the reviews (from book reviewers, not geek cheeleaders) to come in first.
wrote a very funny novella called "An Underachiever's Diary". Highly recommended if you want to read something different from your staple sci-fi/fantasy/computer-book diet.
Enough said.
While it's preferable when females write intelligent things about the scene (vs. writing stupid things about the scene ala aimee deep), and are cast as intelligent females in fictional accounts of hacking (as in Digital Fortress ), or even as interesting characters in computer games (Lara Croft) "The Bug" is still a female writing about computers, rather than writing software , developing algorithms , modding hardware etc.
OTOH, any progress is good, and since progress in the area of "the image of female geeks" requires a substantial change in the culture , perhaps the best place to promote this change is through cultural means.
The terrific thing about The Bug is that the author has written code, so she's writing from experience so we don't get the kind of nonsense we saw in, e.g. "Swordfish." Swordfish was just crap. I mean, come on, why all the blood and guts surrounding gaining physical access? If they had to gain physical access to the servers, they weren't such great hackers. Doh! Plus, much as I like Halle Berry the thing her character did was social engineering--she had to bring in the male gun techie to do the real work. eeeeeyuck! Again, if her social engineering skills were that great, why didn't she just apply it to the problem at hand, rather than the complex and messy techniques the Travolta character came up with. This was the only regard in which Swordfish was realistic: the gal had the by far better skills to solve the problem simply and quickly, yet the solution that got implemented was some big messy over-complicated plan developed by the guy. Typical !
By contrast, I just loved Angelina Jolie's character in "Hackers," errors of fact and ludicrous storyline notwithstanding. She played a great character in Tomb Raider as well--too bad about the muddled plot. And who could forget Carrie Anne Moss' SSH-1 'spoit in Reloaded?
It's when Ullman is brought in as the technical consultant on the Hollywood production of The Bug, and perhaps even Digital Fortress, and we consequently see the first believable and intelligent movies on the topic, that we'll finally see a triumph of substance over style. And I hope they get Angelina Jolie or Carrie Ann Moss to play the lead!
Folks, -any- profession (&/or the workplaces
around it) that has influenced -lots- of
peoples' lives has had TV series about itself.
We've had lots of medicos... from "Ben Casey"
& maybe some before him...
We've had lawyers... from "Perry Mason" &
We've had police from The "Untouchables"...
We've even had teachers & schools (recently
"Boston Public" - which got -cut- in Australia,
soon after a sequence on the use of "Nigger"
(we're not racist down here, we just don't
want to give our people anything too controvertial
to think about...)
Someday (if/when programmers become influential
again (remember when we were -mostly- physicists,
mayhematicians or electronics engineers?),
we might see some TV series on programmers.
Would anybody like to brainstorm up some story-
lines for "The Programmers" that might fit into
a 30-minute slot, each week?
It's a joke, folks. Calm down.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Couldn't they have put the review in a more reliable newspaper such as the Weekly World News, National Enquirer, or The Sun?
-- Will program for bandwidth
why support a huge super corporation like barns and noble. support independants. i guess you will be one of the few happy people working for the big 6 in the future...
gotta go hit starbucks now!
I got about a third through the book and then had to stop. It's rather unsettling to read about a character in a novel, and then slowly come to realise that it is pretty much oneself who is being described here, and in such an unflattering light.
Ethan Levin is a lot like me, living in the Bay Area as a programmer pushing forty, with an ex-girlfriend working for a nonprofit org, even down to some of the smaller mannerisms (Shudder). I'll stick to O'Reilly books in the future, they are much less unsettling.
It's almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity.
Isn't that what Dilbert is for?
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
Hi.
Once upon a time I read this book and posted a review on kuro5hin.org. It was a good book, and it's still on my shelf (meaning I haven't seen myself able to give it away or sell it yet). Keep an eye out for it at your local Half-Price books.
--Robert
I remember reading a hacker book in High School (1983) called the Adolesence of P1. P1 was a program that managed to take over the networked IBM and CRAY mainframes of the day (the 70's??). Typical adventure fair but with many old school hacks like the bank and the school machine that did grades. I thought about it a year ago and it was frightening in that it predicted most of the security fears that people have now... anyone else remember this?
~corporate tool, but employed~
In "Closer to the Machine" she gets intimate with clients and co-workers during the project even.
Extremely unprofessional.
And really...yuck.
Let me put it this way: this book literally made me fear for my own sanity. Now, if that's not a good endorsement, I don't know what is.
>|<*:=
like fiction or artistic license.
Yeah, if someone bedded a coworker or client before a deadline, it would be worthy of censure. However I don't believe the narrator of "Close to the Machine" is Ms. Ullman herself.
-jpeg
She must not be a real programmer.
If so, it would have been titled, "The Bugs". I haven't heard of any software project with only one single bug!
You said: lemme introduce you to a few abstract concepts like fiction or artistic license.I don't believe the narrator of "Close to the Machine" is Ms. Ullman herself.
in response to my comment that in "Closer to the Machine" she gets intimate with clients and co-workers during the project even
Mr. Jpeg: did you read it? Closer to the Machine is a MEMOIR.
From the spamazon Editorial Review of Closer to the Machine by Cliff Barney:
Read it and weep. What I find so disturbing is the non-technical community's (read: Salon, Book Editors) lack of censure for her non-professional approach.And, The Bug--oh!! A bug that only happens sometimes at different places in the code? Christ on a bicycle, hasn't she ever fixed a freakin' memory leak before? Corruption she's clearly familiar with, but this kind has a blindingly obvious Simple solution. Instrument the code with Purify or Insure++, or Electric Fence or at least check where and how memory is being allocated and deallocated. This isn't rocket science, you know. Oh well, guess that's the difference between her "20 years of programming" and my 25.
Sure The Bug is fiction, but it's fiction based on a truly lame approach to debugging.
This is why crime shows and police dramas are always standard. Plenty of odd and unusual behavior. Same with hospital shows. A stream of patients. Not too many prime time weekly series about life on farm in the middle of nowhere (Little House being the exception) or life in a senior citizens home. TV Series located in restaurants, bars, and diners are periodically tried, but it's hard to generate crisis after crisis in a diner.
Now one thing you don't get while programming is a stream of new and odd people coming through each week. There have been office comedies, (Yes Minister) but these are the exception. Sara Michelle Gellar had new demons to slay each week. But imaging trying to carry a series modeled on the movie "The Net" for a few years! Each week another abandoned secret agent types mysterious messages onto Sandra Bullocks computer screen. What's the variation, new fonts?
Programming isn't the center of TV series for the same reason that chess players, writers, philosophers, lexicographers, poets, and mathemeticians aren't --- the interesting things aren't dramatically visible.
I've got it! Each week the wacky cast tries to decode another 100 line error message about syntax errors in C++ templates. A laff riot! For sweeps week, the compiler crashes on a divide by zero error. I can't wait.
I18N == Intergalacticization
I wonder if I could get it read by non-programmers in my company.
Just in order to make them feel the psycological consequences of them changing their specs two weeks before commercial release...
Actually, it was on p. 6, and not even the lead fiction review. That the NYT would grant it such a long review is miraculous enough; it was too much to hope that it would be on the front page.
I know you! Hey why is this story not archived yet?
There is no god
why isnt this story archived