My copy of Mathematica arrived yesterday. Yay.

Today, I sent it back. Boo.

Here’s what happened.

I ordered it on May 28th from the Apple store. 2-day shipping. Yay.
Then, I got the bad news — they couldn’t ship it on the original estimated date. It would ship on or before the 16th of June. Boo.
On the 16th, I got an e-mail saying that my order had shipped, with the Fedex tracking number. Delivery on the 20th. (That’s two business days.) Yay.
On the 20th, no Mathematica. Boo.
I called Fedex. They advised me that no package was ever sent — I should call Apple. I called Apple. Hmmm. There did seem to be some kind of problem, but they would take care of it right away, and send me another copy. Being the language purist that I am, I did suggest that if they hadn’t sent me the first copy, then they weren’t sending me another copy, they were sending me a copy, but that was just me being exasperating. Because it had been their mistake, they would send it overnight delivery. Yay.
The next day, no Mathematica. Boo.
The following day, I receive an e-mail that “my order can’t be shipped when promised, but will ship on or before June 30th”. Yay?
It actually arrives on June 30th. Yay!
So as I’m installing it, I’m reading the elegant enclosed license certificate — and I notice the sentence which says:

Use Class:Academic
This product was purchased at an educational discount.

Wait a minute. I check the Wolfram Research website — and indeed, the educational discount version of Mathematica is a mere US$895, whereas the standard version (which I, alas, not affiliated with an accredited educational institution, must needs purchase — home-schooling doesn’t count), the standard version is US$1880. Which, in addition to taxes and shipping, was the amount charged to my credit card. Boo.
I call Wolfram Research. Unfortunately, since I didn’t purchase this copy from them, they can’t help me. I need to call Apple. Luckily, by now, I have that number on speed dial.

Now, as far as I know (and I checked with the Wolfram rep I spoke with), the academic and standard versions of Mathematica are identical. The same manual (well, book), the same CD, the same bits on the CD, the same elegant license certificate. The only difference between the two (aside from the US$1000 pricing difference) is the appearance on said license certificate of the phrase

This product was purchased at an educational discount.

And whatever bundle of use rights the existence of that sentence might entail — and I’m not exactly clear on what those might be. In any event, if I’m going to give people a hard time about whether they’re sending me a copy or another copy , I’m certainly not going to pass up the implications of this phraseology.

I’ll spare you the details of the discussions. You would think that the easiest solution to this problem would be to mail me (or e-mail me — and I could print it out) a new certificate with the offending sentence removed. Same license number and password. One presumes a database might need to be updated to indicate that this particular license number had, in fact, paid full price — difficult, but not outside the ken of modern computer science.

Sadly, however, this cannot be an option. Apparently, the “educational essence” of that copy cannot be altered by such a casual restatement. The US$1000 pricing differential requires that there be some kind of ceremony, some form of ritual to exorcise that essence — to create the emotional bonding with the true copy, and to preserve the illusion that some important yet ethereal difference warrants such a pricing gap.

And so, I had to trudge down to Kinko’s with my return authorization and send back my “educationally discounted” copy, and return home to await the identical “standard professional” copy for which I paid. Which will ship as soon as they receive the return.

Overnight express, of course.

Yay.

“Did you know,” said Gina, the other day, “that in Spanish, the word meaning to make is the same as the word meaning to do?” I don’t speak Spanish, but it seems that the usage of the Portuguese fazer and the French faire supports this hypothesis. I’m going to have to back up and put this comment in context.

When we met, Gina’s friends were unanimous: I wasn’t her type. And my family was likewise unanimous: Gina wasn’t right for me. Ever since, we are always on the lookout for proof that this relationship couldn’t possibly work — because we have nothing in common and are completely opposite in every regard. So this rumination about vocabulary was about to turn into the latest salvo in this decade long game.

“Because, you see,” she continued, “you are a maker whilst I am a doer. Proving, once again, that we have nothing in common.”

Setting aside the interesting conundrum of a pair of verbs which are arguably opposites in one language whilst being the same word in another, I’d like to ponder the significance of this observation to information technology. More specifically: software. The question that suggests itself is: is coding (or cutting code as Amir would have it) doing or making? I used to think it was making — but that, of course is a product-centric view. Software-as-a-service needs to take the world view that the production of software is doing: there is no such thing as finishing.

The real import of this question, of course, is that doers and makers are different kinds of people; if in fact this essential nature of software is changing, then the people who participate in the activity and enjoy it will also change.

Unless they speak a Romance language — in which case there doesn’t seem to be any difference.

This story had the following curious observation:

Among some people, the efficacy of open-source projects has amplified long-standing complaints that the JCP is not nimble enough to outpace Microsoft’s development efforts and bring enhancements to the market quickly.

If I understand that aright, it means that Microsoft’s development efforts are more nimble than the JCP’s. And the solution, therefore, to become even more nimble, to become more like Microsoft, is to become an open source project.

I must agree with the sentiment, but the logic escapes me.

The dental hygienist who cleaned my teeth today asked if I knew why, in the English language, the word for the country (Philippines) was spelled with a “ph”, but the word for the inhabitants (Filipino) was spelled with an “f”.

I love going to the dentist.

My new machine arrived this past weekend. I guess I must have been one of the last people on the planet to order a PowerMac Dual G5 before the Intel announcement was made. Timing is everything. Maybe it’ll be a collector’s item.

Why the new box? The crystallizing moment probably came when Gina, in frustration, finally snapped “You’ve been going on about this ever since I met you. Just stop talking about it and buy it already.” The it in question is Mathematica. When I was at Morgan Stanley I scored a copy — and that was probably the most fun I had with a computer in the last decade. I first stumbled across it when the NeXT machines came out (also at Morgan Stanley).

Well, if I was going to order a copy of Mathematica, it seemed like a crime to install it on a laptop. Or a Mini. It deserved a worthy machine.

As they say, in for a dime, in for a dollar. The other piece of software I had been interested in noodling with was Motion. And that certainly wasn’t going to run on a laptop. Or a mini.

Well, if I’m going to be animating things with Motion, I’ll need things to be animating. So, logically, I’d also need something like Adobe’s Creative Suite.

Well, the machine is here. Mathematica, however, was delayed for two weeks. In the meantime, I’m working my way through the Motion tutorial.

I met and had breakfast last week with Ben Hyde. A really smart and interesting fellow — I wish I had recorded our conversation. We had fascinating and wide-ranging discussions all morning — but like when trying to remember the really hilarious stand-up routine you heard last night, you can only remember one or two jokes. So it is with that morning.

We did talk about my earlier post comparing the open source movement to the labor movement. Ben agreed that there was merit to an analogy around the idea of “principle for organizing the labor pool”, but suggested that professionalization was a better analogy. My initial reaction was that I liked the idea — we both grew up in an era before software engineering was invented. Back then, it was an art.

When I speak about computer programming as an art, I am thinking primarily of it as an art form, in an aesthetic sense. The chief goal of my work as an educator and author is to help people learn how to write beautiful programs…My feeling is that when we prepare a program, the experience can be just like composing poetry or music…Some programs are elegant, some are exquisite, some are sparkling. My claim is that it is possible to write grand programs, noble programs, truly magnificent ones!…computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. Programmers who subconsciously view themselves as artists will enjoy what they do and will do it better.

– D. Knuth (Computer Programming as an Art. Turing Award Speech 1974)

What the discussion highlighted was the way in which the open source movement falls short of either of these two labor movements. In the event that open source becomes a union movement, open source developers need to start paying dues to fund open source organizations, and start to negotiate with their employers to insist on “free software rights” as part of their employment agreements. Free software sanctions against organizations that balk.

To become a professional movement, there needs to be some form of accreditation with a governing body (like the AMA, or Bar Association) in order to be permitted to “practice open source programming”. Presumably, only accredited practitioners would be allowed access to the source code.

Neither one of these scenarios seems very likely.

The latest issue of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing has an article entitled Between Expert and Lay — talking about the blurring of boundaries between amateur tinkerers and professionals. The article used the word Pro-Am to describe this blend.

I had never heard the word before. It is not a new coinage. The word is apparently used in the sports world. I guess that says something about me.

The article cited this essay / study / book as a reference. The essay is entitled The Pro-Am Revolution.

The first sentence of the essay mentions Linux. The discussion begins with open source. However, having introduced the topic via Linux and open source, the article goes on to explore the idea of collaborating amateurs blending into professional domains for a variety of other activities — and open source fades out. In fact, on page 31, when surveying fields of endeavor for pro-am activity, the list includes photography, playing a musical instrument, many others, and “maintaining a web-site”. That’s as close to “programming” as anything on the list gets.

There are some interesting observations. Like the fact that men are much more likely to be pro-ams than women. This is not restricted to any particular field of endeavor. Which seems to suggest that those fields of endeavor where “pro-amishness” is rising will tend to have fewer women involved.

Another observation is that most of the fields of endeavor tend to be age specific. Different fields, different ages. What’s the age range for pro-am software, I wonder?

Recommended. It ends with this observation:

Knowledge, once held tightly in the hands of professionals and
their institutions, will start to flow into networks of dedicated
amateurs. The crude, all or nothing, categories we use to carve up
society – leisure versus work, professional versus amateur – will need
to be rethought. The Pro-Ams will bring new forms of organisation
into life, which are collaborative, networked, light on structure and
largely self-regulating.

Every time I went to update my blog in the last couple of weeks, the site was down. Upon investigation, it turned out that the site wasn’t actually down — my IP address had been blocked. So, when I was home, it appeared to be down — when I was traveling, it didn’t. I had observed that the site appeared to be unstable — but I was traveling a lot — and didn’t correlate the apparent “outages” with being home. Last couple of weeks, I wasn’t traveling — so the site was “down” all the time.

It’s fixed now.

Last week was a political one. I spent a few days at the CCIA Open Source and Industry Alliance Caucus in Washington (more on that later), and a reception for the Open Resource Group (no URL yet).

At one point, I found myself vigorously defending a position that I wouldn’t have thought I held. Sometimes, a discussion leads one to a new realization (well, it happens to me, anyway). In this case, I realized the congruence between the motivations of the organized labor movement and the open source software movement.

As a movement, open source software has been about empowering individuals at the grass roots, by encouraging collaboration to achieve the goals, and resisting the unenlightened (typically large corporations) who would seek to prevent this. Strangely reminiscent of the labor movement. Unions are about empowering workers at the grass roots, by encouraging collaboration to achieve the goals, and resisting the unenlightened (typically large corporations) who would seek to prevent this. The goal of the open source advocate is better and cheaper software — the goal of the union activist is better working conditions and higher wages.

So, another way of thinking about this is that the open source movement is basically a union organizing movement for programmers.

Certainly, the venture capitalists may not see it the same way. And, certainly, the libertarian streak that runs through the open source community will take exception to this characterization (hence the vigorous defense I mentioned earlier). Still, those libertarians are working hard to organize a grass roots community to collaboratively build better software.

Some union sympathizers focus primarily on working conditions and wages — quality and value. As do some open source advocates. Some union sympathizers focus more on human rights and freedoms. So do some open source advocates. But that tends to be a schism of rhetoric, not objectives.

The next step would seem to be organizing the open source community by creating a dues-paying membership. The dues would fund the key activities in a stabler way than the current charitable contribution model. The Free Software Foundation took a step in this direction with the introduction of their Associates program. I joined. It is an opportunity to participate in funding the movement. I hope you join, too.

I received the following e-mail this week:

Dear ,

Your current monthly bill is now available at http://www.cingular.com/ocs. Log in, then go to My Account and select View Bill.

Your payment will be due approximately 10 days from the date of this e-mail. If you have chosen to have your Cingular bills paid automatically through our recurring payment option, your payment will be made for you in approximately 10 days. To make a one-time payment, log in and select Make a Payment.

Ordinarily, I suppose, receiving this would not have been noteworthy, except that I had canceled my Cingular service about two months ago (I had moved to an area with iffy coverage). No worries, I would just reply to the e-mail, and point out the mistake. Except, of course, for the following postscript to the e-mail:

Please do not reply to this e-mail, as it will go to an unmonitored mailbox.

I find it annoying to receive e-mail ( or visit a website ), where there doesn’t appear to be any way to notify people about a mistake. Why wouldn’t Cingular (or any company, for that matter) want to accept an e-mail inquiry or response? The alternative, as we shall see, is likely to be a phone call — more expensive for the company, and more frustrating for the customer.

Following the instructions in the e-mail, I logged in to the web-site, where I received the following page:

There is no account information available. Please call 1 800-208-3081.
For your reference, this is message number 4001.

Aha! Progress, of a sort. Now I have a phone number to call, where a human can respond to my problem. Noting, always, that had I been able to respond to the e-mail, it could have been queued for processing by the very same customer care representative — and I wouldn’t have had the added frustration of listening to the on-hold music.

Once I’m talking to the representative, things start to get more frustrating. She informs me that I don’t appear to have an account. I know this — the reason I’m calling is to encourage Cingular to stop sending me e-mail reminders to pay my (non-existent) bill. Ah!, she says. I’m afraid I can’t do that. “They” will have to do that.

“They”? Who is “they”? I ask. “They”, I am told, are the people who fix these kind of problems. Do “they” work for Cingular? I ask. Yes, “they” do. In that case, I point out, since “they” work for Cingular, and so do you, then to me, as a customer calling the customer care number, you all appear to be part of the same group.

There is a word in the English language for the “they” that includes you.

That word is “we”.

The customer care rep would have none of that. “They” were the only people who could help me. How could I contact “them”? I couldn’t. Could she talk to “them” on my behalf? No, she couldn’t. She might be able to ask her supervisor to talk to “them”, but she wouldn’t commit to it.

My guess is that the system that sends out the e-mail uses a different database than the actual billing system. There was a hiccup in the account deletion process, resulting in what the IT people call an out-of-sync. So now, somebody from IT is going to have to manually delete that record in the mailing list database, because the system that the care reps use probably checks the account against the billing system, and if it isn’t there, isn’t designed to look in the mailing list system. So “they” is probably somebody in IT. I guess.

The story has a happy ending. Even though I was getting error message 4001 (the representative had no idea what that meant — shouldn’t they have access to the list of errors? shouldn’t we?), I could still log in. And the menu item links beckoned. So I opted to “disable paperless billing”.

The result?

Paperless Billing Disable Confirmation

You have just successfully disabled your paperless billing. Either on your next billing cycle or the one after that, you will begin to receive a paper bill by mail.

If I guessed correctly, that will have the effect of deleting my ID from the list of people being e-mailed.

Way to go, “they”. I love it when the customer can resolve problems more effectively than the care rep. It means your website works. But I’d still consider how to allow e-mail responses to be monitored.

Then again, I wonder if I’m going to start receiving paper bills with nothing on them…