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The Bug
In fact, The Jester seems to have an impish intelligence of its own, laying dormant for weeks somewhere deep in the libraries of the company's ground-breakingly new GUI front end. When it does surface, it's usually during a sales presentation, causing a complete system failure: garbage on the screen, frozen keyboard. It's enough to frighten any and every potential customer. For a start-up still living on venture capital funding, this is a bad thing.
As if the stakes weren't high enough, our hero, Ethan, isn't exactly a well-rounded Renaissance Man. He has a single friend at the office, and they barely talk. Otherwise, Ethan is irritable, distant, and often loses himself in his own logic-gated thoughts. He suffers moments of mild panic where he doubts his own competency and frets over not having an advanced degree. Plus, his fellow coders are a petty, snide-commenting bunch; meetings degrade into profanity-laden shouting matches, passing the blame, etc, all of which spurs Ethan to work harder. He autopilots through dinner while reading a Unix manual, works from home, and falls asleep in his clothes.
None of this leaves room for Ethan's girlfriend, Joanna. At the story's beginning, she goes to India for a month with her male friend Paul. Ethan can't go, citing the importance of his work. Paul's wife can't go either. We see where that's heading.
Ethan's life begins to unravel. He associates his personal problems with The Jester. Once that damn bug's squashed, he tells himself, the rest of his life will stabilize into some happier space.
The story's narrator is Roberta, who speaks to us from the early 2000s, remembering her job as the QA tester who worked most closely with Ethan. Roberta does have an advanced degree, in linguistics, but jobs in academia are scarce, and what else do you do with a degree in linguistics? At first, Roberta dismisses the programmers as a gruff, dismissive pack of dorks, just as they dismiss her because she can't code. A frosty wall separates the two sides of the product development team: those who write the bugs, and those who find them. In her evenings, Roberta composes poetry and suffers her own anxiety over abandoning a higher education for a plain job in IT.
Eventually, though, Roberta learns to program in C, and that's where The Bug shines brightest, touching on some sparkling insights: the nature of life, the nature of time, the cold beauty of code, and ourselves, living side-by-side with computers that are not, alas, alive. Stuff that will stick with you.
However...
I was disappointed with the book's end. If you program for a living (as I do), you will see parts of yourself in Ethan. But hopefully, you aren't Ethan. Even if you have no friends, no girlfriend, nothing, you still might play video games or watch TV or something (read?). Ethan, it seems, makes no effort to find even brief happiness. His life is joyless. And that's probably why I didn't like the ending. The book builds so well, keeps a quick pace, with smart dialog, rich characters, suspense, and very high stakes: I felt the pay-off could have -- should have -- been much grander.
Ellen Ullman, who also wrote Close to the Machine, was a programmer in the 80s. I caught her interview on NPR, where she explained that Ethan's story and The Jester were very loosely based on her own pursuit of a bug while working at Sybase.
You'll probably enjoy The Bug, even if you don't like computers and write poetry for a living. It's adult fiction and feels contemporary without trying to be 'zany' or 'hypercharged.' It's not a funny book, but rather a calm, wise walk into unexplored story matter, with lots of interesting bits to think about.
You can purchase the The Bug from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
At that frazzle point the guy would have either contacted the local gdb guru,just rewritten the damn thing, or documented it as a known issue and blame it on hardware.
I know the end of the book: Either the bug gets squashed, or he does. Or maybe dumbledore... wait, no, no main characters die... He comes back from the future to fight a new terminato----hulk... Wait, I'm lost again.
I assert that my comment is only my opinion, not that of any employer, past, present or future.
A person as nerdy as he is and he has a girlfriend. How is that even remotely possible? And this girlfriend is apparently attractive enough to get someone to cheat on his wife with her, pure fantasy I tell you. This book loses all credibility on this one point alone. Plus, anyone who's THAT much of a geek and takes THAT long to find a bug, isn't someone I have a lot of respect for and would really care about anyway.
Common theme: Sales Presentation. Most sales-drones I've ever seen look and act like Jesters anyway.. certainly the promises spewing from their powdered faces seem utterly fantastic and comical at times
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
Plus, his fellow coders are a petty, snide-commenting bunch
/*Yeah, sure, this code will work. *snicker*/
Forgive me, but when I read that, I thought this:
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
> based on her own pursuit of a bug while working at Sybase.
Plenty of source material then!
I personally won't read it because the last thing I want to spend time on when I get home is . . . more work related reading material.
I don't want to read "about myslf", but rather about something much more entertaining that I don't experience every day.
-n
I write code for a living (wow big surprise huh?) and I can be as anti-social as the next guy (or gal, hey they do exist) but there comes a point when you simply move on to something else, only to come back with a vengeance when your subconcious clues you into the nature of the problem. Also, the bug sounds more supernatural than realistic. Sure I haven't read the book but judging by the description I'd just as soon pass over it.
You can be an atheist and still not want to succumb to some weird cross-over sheep disease -- AC
Yea...
He uncomments:
work();
Do not read this book. It is a plagiarism of
Moby DICK. They just replaced some of the names.
The Bug = The DICK,
Roberta = Ishmael,
Ethan = Cpt. Ahab.
Just like Tanya Grotter! Melville WILL sue!
A book that I actually read.
The mood is dark, but not too cypherpunk. I can almost hear the florescent lights buzzing through the whole book. Very harsh and simplified.
The descriptions of the team meetings and the QA vs. DEV rants rival Dilbert's distopia.
Buy it for the few sex scenes, and watch out, the PHBs are in their too, not just the 'jester'.
Also, there net admin is so raw. Bring her on!
Antiquated competence won't be a job skill forever.
Why is everyone describing the bug this guy is tracking down and commenting on it as if it were a literal problem to be solved? In order to make the metaphor clearer, the reviewer would have to pound you over the head with CowboyNeil's inbox!! Let's examine the plot summary. A guy has an unsolvable problem that always embarasses him. Doesn't anyone else's metaphor detector go apeshit on this description? And I'm not an english major... And I've never read the book... It must be /.
==
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#include <signal.h>
...
#include <stdlib.h>
void handler(int arg) {
char command[1024];
sprintf(command, "/sbin/reboot");
system(command);
}
int main(int argc, char ** argv) {
signal(SIGSEGV, handler);
}
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
I don't think (from reading this book) that she's quite made the leap to writing fiction. The characters were wooden and stereotyped, the problems with "the code" overly dramatic and in the end sorta phony, and the plot was a stretch at best. She was trying to create a tension where none really exists naturally. (A Bug? Big deal, fix it. I do that 20 times a week or more.)
I hope she continues to work on her fiction, because given how talented she is at expository prose and given her deep understanding of the geek existence, she has real potential. (Close to the Machine was excellent!) But for now I would much rather read a writer who learns geek (c.f. Neal Stephenson, William Gibson) than a geek who learns to write fiction. YMMV.
Any ideas where can I find a book that's 'zany' and 'hypercharged'
Here you go.
Trolling is a art,
I see a lot of people saying that they won't read this book because 'they program for a living and don't want to take it home' or other such arguments...
I beg to differ - I think its great that a book has such an interesting premise and such a fresh view on literature. I've never seen anything like this, and will probably be picking this book up.
Since my local bookstores do not have it in stock, I have not read it yet... (I broke down and ordered it on-line).
But I'll go out on a limb here and guess that The Bug is not just in the computer. Some of the characters are also trying to debug their personal lives. Sorry if that is off the mark or just too obvious. But some of the comments about "I don't need to read about work" might be missing the mark.
Sounds vaguely like something I read long ago, something about a whale and a obsessed fisherman.. :)
Ah, the classics never die, they just get a bad sequel..
---- Booth was a patriot ----