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**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, well... But it is the kind of thing - and I cannot stress this enough... This is the kind of thing that you learn when as a programmer you go into production again. |
**Jerod Santo:** A hundred percent. |
**Bert Hubert:** And I've since heard many people, they told me that Trend Micro also does this... And I actually ordered some hardware stuff from a store today and they have a link that is vulnerable to this. You have to click, and it says "I'm going to collect my hardware now." And that is already useless for them, b... |
**Jerod Santo:** Because Microsoft's already registering everyone's hardware for them. |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's a crying shame. It's tough out there in the real world of the internet, isn't it? I'm going back to your monitoring site... What formats does the government put stuff out? Are you like diffing HTML, or is it better than that? |
**Bert Hubert:** Oh, this is a story... This is a story. So on the one hand, they have a glorious API. And actually, I didn't read the manual. They use this thing called OpenSync, or something like that... And that is apparently a sort of weakly determined standard by which you can replicate a relational database to so... |
So it is quite convoluted, because I think it would have been easier if they just said "Look, this is our SQL database and you can query it." But no, you get this stream of XML messages. And that is actually quite glorious and good. Now is where the problem comes. Governments, when they send you documents, they love PD... |
\[20:00\] So in order to make all this stuff work, I've found out that there is a sort of official government archive of government documents, and there they also publish the XML. So in the course of this trajectory, I retrieved the document like four times, and to save it, I have to retrieve it from some kind of offic... |
But it also allowed me to make these statistics to say "Who are our Congress people that talk the most, or that talk least, or that have the longest sentences?" And because they log it all so well, I could also "Who are the fastest talkers of our Congress? And who are the slowest talkers?" And this is of course not ver... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, relative to PDF, it's better, right? |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. Well, everything is better than the PDF. I mean, people -- I understand that people sort of love it because it feels like it's a standard format, and you have everything in there that you need... But to process it, it's nasty. For example, if you have a two column PDF file, it's actually not easy... |
**Jerod Santo:** So do y'all have the filibuster over there? |
**Bert Hubert:** Actually, no, we don't. And I try telling people that our politics are also becoming wilder, and less useful, but we haven't yet sunk to the level that we need a filibuster kind of thing. So for now, if you have a simple majority, you can actually get stuff done in Dutch government... But I worry where... |
**Jerod Santo:** I always thought the filibuster was just the dumbest thing. It's like, "If we can just talk long enough, we can run the clock out." It's so silly. |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, yeah... |
**Jerod Santo:** But I ask that because - then do you have any blowhards? Do you have a ranking of "Here's our most wordy politicians, versus not"? |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, we do. We have these people that actually -- well, they will talk your ears off... And actually, it's not always who you think it is. It is sort of funny to -- when you run these numbers, you find out that it's actually quite often that it's different from what you thought it would be. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What we all need in government is a haka. |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, excuse me? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** A haka. |
**Jerod Santo:** What's this? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I may or may not be pronouncing that properly... Have y'all seen this in New Zealand? This tail end of last year? |
**Jerod Santo:** No. |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, no, that was very impressive. And they should do more of that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, my gosh... I'm not sure the context of the protest, but very much a spectacle. And I think we all need versions of that in ours. Describe it, Bert. Describe it in your best words. |
**Bert Hubert:** Well, that is in New Zealand... That's what you're referring to, probably. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes. |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. So they had a law that was passed which was not good for the indigenous people in New Zealand, and then they got really upset. And then the indigenous people or the people affiliated with them in Parliament actually performed a whole song, a protest song in government, which is really a very impo... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, goodness gracious. Please, no. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** This is a may-be a song, but I would not describe it necessarily as song. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] It doesn't sound very nice? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's more like a screaming song, and like a dance, and a performance... |
**Jerod Santo:** A chant, maybe? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Like a chant, yeah. It's probably more akin to a chant. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Very performative. One person began it... |
**Recording:** \[24:00\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** A great demonstration. I think it's turned into a meme in terms of how to protest... She tears up whatever it is they're protesting, and then many people that are in the Parliament space begin to join in with this dance, that turns into song and dance. |
**Jerod Santo:** Wow. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And so it's very -- it demonstrates very well. So if you feel very strongly against something, clearly it's got a very visual and a visceral process to like make you pay attention, you know? So it's interesting... You should check it out, Jerod. |
**Jerod Santo:** I will. I'll go check that out. |
**Break:** \[24:47\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, one thing about governments, it seems, as they go on, they either incline or decline. And many of them decline. And this is a very poor way of segueing into the topic of long-term software development, which is something you've been interested in, Bert, and I'm also interested in, as we have syst... |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, so I was invited -- so I'm a very part-time technical advisor to the Dutch government also, to what you would call the FEC, the electoral board... And they built this software for tabulating the national elections. And they are revamping it, and they said "Would you take a look at our code? Can y... |
So I looked into that and I thought "Well, this is not going to be something that's viable for the next 10 years", because these dependencies change all the time, and npm might go away for the next 10 years... So I turned that into a study, "What would you do these days if you had a 10-year software project?" And I wen... |
So I got a bunch of very strident feedback from people. They said "Well, if you look at the problems that people have with old software, something goes wrong with the software, there is a problem..." Something always goes wrong, of course... And then in your mature software project, you need to figure out what is actua... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, can we borrow some? |
**Bert Hubert:** Well, having 25 is not an optimum, I can tell you that. But even if you have 25, there is no need to set up a complicated data structure to hold 25 political affiliation names. But one day you might sit there and say "Hey, wouldn't it be useful, wouldn't it be fun if we had a complicated red-black tree... |
\[32:06\] And the other thing that people came up with is that people change jobs a lot, for a number of reasons. But if you want to do long-term software development, the easiest way to do that is with long-term employees. Because they build up knowledge, they know how the stuff works... But if you have people that ar... |
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