Dr. Dobb's Journal October 2001
It was a slow Saturday night at Foo Bar, the Silicon Valley saloon where I moonlight as a bartender so as to eavesdrop on the exchanges of its habitués. A couple of dot-com crash victims were drowning their wounds or licking their sorrows or some such, silently, at opposite ends of the long bar where I stood buffing the beer steins. Downstage front the femme four were getting giddy at the geek girl table, named that by them. I eavesdropped.
Keri, a mostly Macintosh freelance programmer in a style-setting Scott Kim T-shirt and miniskirt, spilled a drop of her Bellini on the skirt as she poured a dose of her day's troubles on her friends.
"I fell down on the catwalk this morning at a Meet the Developer Online Chat over at the Oracle iDevelop site," she said. "It was sooo humiliating. I was their little geek girl du jour. Everybody was great, the chat chief was great and the chat chick was great and all the little chatters were great. I, however, was not great. It was like...I had this like...total meltdown. Which is weird because I love to chat."
Sam, a self-described open-source hacker girl, patted Keri's hand. "Honey, you're the queen of chat."
Keri took a comforting slurp of Bellini. "Well, for a chat queen, I don't know Jack about chat. The chat software didn't mesh with my browser. Or my Jay Vee Em. Something didn't mesh with something. It was a nightmare." She waved to me. "Hey, what does a girl have to do to get a post-chat-crash chocolate fix around here?"
I brought over a dish of M&Ms.
As usual, it was Mandy, the in-house programmer for a large grey firm in the financial district, who brought logic to the table. "It probably was your JVM. Macs and Java don't mesh. They sometimes seem to be meshing, but there's no real rapport."
"I thought Mac Oh Yes Sex was supposed to solve all that."
"Have you installed MacOS X?"
"Well, no, but — "
"Then I think I see your problem."
Char, a web site designer with a classy studio South of Market, was very Eileen Fisher that night in a dark number that complemented her dark eyes. "I never have problems meshing," she said, adding coyly, "I always use Trey's software."
Mandy winced. "Char, that is so — "
"Loyal?" Char suggested primly.
Sam shook her head with a world-weary waggle. "Girl, vendor loyalty is a concept invented by vendors for the benefit of vendors."
Keri cleared her throat theatrically. "Hello? Could we get back to — "
"It's the Big-Endian Conspiracy," Sam said.
"What's that?" Keri asked around several M&Ms, "Something to do with French wine?"
"It has to do with byte order," Mandy explained. "It's really from Gulliver's Travels, but ignore that. In a Big-Endian processor architecture, the most significant byte has the lowest address. Although, if there really is a conspiracy, it has to be a Little-Endian conspiracy, because I'm pretty sure your Mac has a Big-Endian architecture, like all Motorola-based machines. The Intel world is Little-Endian. But I doubt that any of this has anything to do with your chat software incompatibility."
"It's really just the old battle between the eighters and the sixers," Sam shrugged. "It used to mean those who are passionate about processors with an eight in the model number, or with a six."
"And which are you, an eighter or a sixer?" Keri asked her.
"I go either way. I'm just passionate." She raised a suggestive eyebrow. "Sometimes I use both at the same time."
Char made a face. "Eeeew! That's yucky."
"And how IS your Trey doing with his antitrust verdict?" Sam asked with faux sweetness. "Will he do time?"
Keri raised both hands. "Ladies, ladies. Time out. I think we all need Cosmopolitans." The motion was seconded and passed, and I delivered.
Other customers came in then and I lost the thread of the geek girls' conversation. Later, when the others had left, Keri came over to the bar swirling the last sips of her last Cosmo.
"In a world with a choice of standards," she asked, being her own end-of-evening rhetorical self, "is vendor loyalty only for vendors? Are all our software battles just remakes of Gulliver's Travels, but not so Swift? And if Bill Gates defines The Road Ahead, do all roads lead to Redmond?"
She set her empty glass down, and as she turned to go, she said what she always says instead of goodbye.
"Tomorrow."
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mike@swaine.com