Stay on the sunny side of cyphers

[Howie Goodell]

Hi --

My cousin asked me to give her some ideas for a SNL-style
skit about, "The Software Group from Hell."  I had a lot of
fun complying.  Unfortunately it seems easier to be funny
exploiting stereotypes than challenging them.


             The Software Group from Hell

(characters with descriptions and varying amounts of dialog)

Game Boy
He's on the 8715th level of UltraGigaQuake.  Don't bother
him; he's closing in on the world record level of 9217.  He
announces a new level every minute or so.

Jason and Bob
Two young punk programmers running through the office
playing paintball, popping in between other vignettes to
splatter one another or an innocent bystander.  Jason wrote
a program that is about to complete the company's big
project, but Bob hacked into his computer and inserted a
virus.  Now the program runs so slowly that the answer only
comes up a line at a time every few minutes.  Each time a
line comes up, people rush to his monitor and desperately
copy it down before the screen goes black.

The D.O.T.
Daniel O. Torvalds, AKA "The Dot", erstwhile dot-bomb
billionaire CEO, sits on the phone all day chasing deals and
munching pizza while dropping jaded, world-weary asides and
telling war stories about the 4 spectacularly successful
startups he sold to AOL, Sony, Microsoft, and IBM.  The
other 11 including the latest were flops; so right now he is
broke and crashing here.  He is 22.

The Autistic Savant
(Model his mannerisms and speech on Dustin Hoffman's
performance in "Rainman.")  He is standing, wearing a
head-mounted display and typing on a chording keyboard in
his back pocket, complaining that his AI speech recognition
program won't fit on a single CD anymore.  

"But a CD has 650 megabytes.  How many lines of code is
that?" 

"45,213,917 lines of code.  5,313,713 of them are 'if'
statements.  I like 'if' statements."  

"How did you have time to write that much code?"

"Your keyboard is inefficient.  I remapped my keys.  Not
Dvorak.  Dvorak is optimized for English.  My keyboard was
optimized for C++.  I don't use my keyboard any more.  I put
7 switches on a round frame.  7 switches gives me 7 bits.  I
chord in ASCII."

"Oh yes, ASCII.  That stands for 'American Standard Code for
Information Interchange', right?"

"No, ASCII is what it produces.  It's the ass-key.  It's in
my back pocket.  Pretty soon I won't need my keyboard.  It
understands voice input.  'Computer, new program.  File name
helloworld dot c.  Start of text.  Sharp include less than
stdio dot h greater than.  New line.  main open paren close
paren.  New line.  Open brace.  New line.  Indent printf
open paren double quote capitalized Hello capitalized World
exclamation double quote close paren semicolon.  New line. 
Close brace.  End of program.  Save file.  Compile
helloworld dot c.  link helloworld.  Run helloworld.  Look,
it runs."
(passes head-mounted display and microphone to narrator, who
puts it on.)

"Cool!  May I try one?"

"Alright."

"'Hello world!'  Hey; how come it says, 'halo wart'?  'This
is AI'  How come it says, 'tease East rayon?'  Why, it only
works for you.  It only recognizes autistic programmer voice
input!"

Dr. No
(The supervisor; he has no idea what his people are doing,
but gets a feeling of power by refusing all their requests,
even the most reasonable.)

The Cypherpunk
(He's sitting at his computer wearing combat fatigues, a
pistol, and ninja throwing stars)

"I write codes.  Nobody can break them"

"I used the Data Encryption Standard once."

"DES?  I can break DES with a pocket calculator!  I found
the backdoor NSA put into it."

"The National Security Agency?  The really secret one?"

"Yeah, or, 'No Such Agency', because for years they wouldn't
admit it existed.  At least that's what my buddy Osma says. 
I never know when he's kidding, though; he's such a clown."

"I used RSA once, too."

"RSA?  I can break 512-bit RSA keys with the code cracker in
my basement.  You feel safe when you see that little closed
lock icon in Netscape or Explorer, right?  SSL encryption. 
I can break that puny little 128-bit SSL with my eyes
closed.  I've been collecting credit card numbers from
Amazon for weeks.  See?  (he fans a huge stack of paper)  I
haven't used any of them, though.  I have plenty of money
from the code I sold my buddy Osma.  It's a really cool
code.  Much better than RSA.  Better than elliptic curve. 
Nobody can break it.  Osma loved it.  Get this; he put a
note on the check, 'I used this to order the World Trade
Center bombing.'  What a clown, that Osma."

"Osma?  You mean Osama?"

"Yeah, that's how he said it:  Osama Been Loadin or
something."

"Holy shit!  You sold a code to Osama bin Laden?  We're
gonna get killed!"

(Agent #1 jumps out in shooter stance, pistol pointed at
Cypherpunk)
"Freeze!  NSA!"
(Agents #2, #3, etc., ditto)
"Freeze!  CIA!"  "Freeze!  FBI!"  "Freeze!  DEA!"  "Freeze! 
ATF!"  "Freeze!  ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP!"
(The agents disarm and handcuff Cypherpunk)

Agent #1:  "He's a terrorist!"
Agent #2:  "He's not an American, he's a friggin Ayrab! 
I'll bet his skin is really brown!
(pulls out a handkerchief and scrubs Cypherpunk's face
vigorously.)
Agent #3"  "A sand nigger!"

(as they haul Cypherpunk away, he starts shouting)
"You can't stop me!  Information wants to be free!  The
unbreakable code function is modular exponent p over q to
the .."
(All the agents shoot Cypherpunk with their silenced
weapons, and the one with the handkerchief cleans up the
blood as they drag away his limp body.  Two other agents
take his computer.  The last agent addresses the horrified
software group, standing with their backs to the audience, )

"Let me show you something that will explain why this
happened.  Watch closely!"
(he holds up a camera and flashes it at the audience with
full _Men In Black_ schtick)

"You just had a layoff.  People received a generous
severance package, but they won't be back."
(he takes Cypherpunk's timecard from Dr. No and departs.)

Jason:  Oh look; a cool desk chair!
(trundles it off)

Dr. No:  Post-Its!


Take care!
Howie Goodell
-- 
Howie Goodell  hgoodell at cs.uml.edu  Pr SW Eng, WearLogic
Sc.D. Cand  HCI Res Grp  CS Dept  U Massachussets Lowell
http://people.ne.mediaone.net/goodell/howie
Dying is soooo 20th-century!   http://www.cryonics.org