:: Come on, feel the noize ::

Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Sometimes I forget how quiet the digital age can be. The industrial revolution gave us rattling engines and humming turbines, giant clanking machines clamoring for lubricant and belching embers. The information revolution reduced the forefront of industry to the quiet whir of cooling fans, tucked neatly away in some insulated co-location facility. The sound of work getting done is the muffled cough of a coworker, or the professionally restrained voices of a conference call, sounds that were always around but used to vie with the nuts-and-bolts machinery for aural supremacy.

A small part of my job involves processing data, not in the same sense normally associated with "data processing", where I'd be entering handwritten data from a survey form or what not and entering it into some field on my computer screen, but grabbing some files from point A and running them through an interface so all that data comes out at point B looking more manageable. It's like supervising an assembly line, but totally silent. The only sign it's finished is a little "Succeeded" indicator on a web page somewhere. Imagine if your washing machine, printing press, or go-cart engine made no sound whatsoever and didn't appear to move in the slightest. I think it's creepy not to have some a/v feedback, even just in an ambient form.

Software designers recognize this. Progress bars and hourglasses let us know that, while nothing looks to have changed, we can rest assured that a little silicon brain somewhere (be it under our desks, on our laps, or thousands of miles away in a server farm) has acknowledged our request and isn't slacking off (silicon generally has a can-do attitude). But there's no need to add such niceties to this internal system at my workplace, built as it was with the twin startup constraints of expeditiousness and frugality.

Today, for reasons far too irrelevant and dorky to discuss here, I got to process some data outside of the automated interface, via a good ol' fashioned command-line interface. Instead of detached silence, I got back raw progress output, one character at a time, five or six characters per second. Voila:

Each marker represents a record being processed (hyphen = no change, u = updated, n = new). There were tens of thousands of these lines scrolling down my terminal window over the course of several hours, with the result being that I felt much more connected to that task.

It's no pistons a-clanging, but it'll do. Now I can retire to my tenement walk-up and engage in wacky antics with my wife and dim-witted but loyal best friend/neighbor feeling like something's actually been done. Perhaps we'll go to the local juke-joint. I hear the Charleston is all the rage these days...

Posted by morland @ 07:58 PM

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