All programmers should be familiar with GIGO. It’s a pretty fundamental concept which has become somewhat less known in era of Google. What has become more the norm is an idea that data is everything and we as programmers have to do everything in our power to make the garbage something useful.

My current job involves writing an app that takes data from nearly 1000 different and disparate sources and generates a standard database out of it. This is a concept people have started referring to as GIDO (Garbage In, Data Out). Let me tell you, it’s a pain in the butt. Especially when the data sources say that we can only use their “data” if we agree to not change it.

This is why I am starting the Made Up Data Initiative or MUDI for short. The goal is to write programs that output data which is convincing to the general public but which is, in fact, entirely fictitious. Transactions would look something like this:

• Joe Public: What’s the lowest price offered on ukuleles?
• Search Engine: Ummm… how does $12 sound? Go to walmart.
• Jane Public: What are the symptoms of itchy boot rash?
• Search Engine: Itching and a rash in the boot area.
• Timmy Public: Who’s my real father?
• Search Engine: The Milkman has your eyes.

This would much easier to code and would probably give answers which were just as good to most people.

About 2pm today the phone started ringing and on the other end was hundreds of angry customers. It seems that one or more of the lines that Oregon uses to sell power to California was damaged by a wild fire in the Mt Shasta area of Northern California. That caused a power interuption in the Palo Alto area. The Palo Alto area is where our company’s hosting provider is located. Our hosting provider had poorly installed diesel generators. Poorly installed diesel generators cause… something which made all the servers go down. In other news a butterfly flapped it’s wings in the rainforest today and as a result my rss reader stopped working.

We only host a couple dozen sites, but all of our clients depend on our DNS. So for about 5 hours today our clients were quite unhappy with us. Well, that’s what they get for doing business for people who think it’s a good idea to buy 54 hot pockets to feed 6 people.

This post was brought to you by the letter N. N is for nonsequiter.

Have you ever added up the cost of the software it takes to live like a web developer? I never really put 2 and 2 thousand together before because, I suppose, that when you buy it little by little you don’t realize how much your spending. Just for kicks (and because I woke up like 2 hour early this morning) I put together a list of all the software I sue at home and/or at work and then worked the plus button for a while. I nearly had a heart attack. My wallet is still being examined by the doctor but we’re hopeful it will be ok.

• Windows XP Professional: $300
• Adobe Creative Suite 2: $1200
• Dreamweaver: $400
• Microsoft Office 2003 (technically not needed for development, but necessary for office life): $500
• MS Visio 2003: $300

It’s almost to the point that I’d have to become a prostitute just to get enough cash together to be able to become a freelance programmer again. Then we get into issues of my pimp not liking my attitude and my Johns not wanting to hear about the latest AJAX hack I’ve found. I know there are Open Source alternatives to most of the products I listed (and I home I am a loyal Open Office user) but the usability of many of those free alternatives makes the prostitution option more appealing. For now I’ll just be glad that I don’t need to buy any of that software but I’m not getting rid of my fishnet stockings no matter how much my g/f wants me to.

Our development server is plagued by javascript trolls. They live under the machine’s northbridge chip and cause Javascript to behave in unexpected ways. Beware the javascript trolls for they are quick to anger and often retaliate for trangression against them by giving your email address out to spammers.

Javascript trolls ae generally characterized by form validation scripts which do not validate forms, menus that do not collapse, and giant soul sucking pits of wasted time from which one one can return. Treatments include: working on a frontpage site (so the javascript doesn’t seem so bad) and pawning the task off on one of the other programmers in the office.

The pathetisad network grew by one today with the creation of this blog. I’ll get around to skinning it once I have a little time.

This is primaraly going to be a coding blog, but I’ll throw a little personal information in from time to time. For example I way at some point find an elegent way to segway from serializing arrays in PHP to my hatred of pants. I am convinced that this Yeti of a segway does, in fact, exist.

My primary source of material will most likely come from my job at a dotcom. Even if I lack any new insight into the world of programming, life in an office should give me no shortage of stories about squirrels who are married and red swingline staplers.

If that paragraph didn’t make you a reader for life then I don’t know what will.