waffle

I thought we left the stage where we acted like five-year-olds.

Extremely important update: DB says he didn’t send the reply email with the picture in it. This changes a lot of things, but a lot of things still apply in this post, so I’m leaving it verbatim with this caveat. (Update ends.)

I like to pretend I know DB a little more than fleetingly. I know that he can be a little less correct and nice than you should in order to prove a point. I guess the best way to sum it up is that he’s not afraid to provoke, even if he’s not confrontationist about it. It’s not the first time. But I have to say that when he posted an image that crashes an image toolkit deeply embedded in Mac OS X, he stepped over the line. (For what should be obvious reasons, I won’t be directly linking to it, but you can hunt it out with Firefox, Camino, Opera (shudder), IE (double shudder) or any Windows/Linux browser not using the same image toolkit - the post is linked from the onlyfirst link in this entry.) He clearly had a choice of putting the image before or after the ‘jump’ to the full entry, and he chose to put it before.

I know that it’s Apple’s fault that the bug is there. I know that it’s a real shame that there are bugs like this in image toolkits. I know that DB has had some grief with similar - and lots of dissimilar - bugs before and has been very vocal about Apple’s Quality Assurance division. I know that, and I respect the fact that the ultimate trigger lays miles away from DB in the depths of Cupertino. But that doesn’t make it right for DB to post it.

That doesn’t give DB the right to keep the image there — had he moved the image to below the fold or simply removed the inline image replacing it with a link after a day or so, I for one — and many others — would maybe have deemed it acceptable. The point would have been proven, and if the image isn’t there to prove the point, by the method of elimination, what else is there to arrive at than that it being there to piss people off, to destroy piled up tabs or browsing sessions, conveniently being able to blame Apple afterwards? DB’s reply to Wincent is definitely meant to piss Wincent off (by attaching the image in question to the mail) - the reply wasn’t entirely unprovoked, but neither was Wincent’s. (Which isn’t to say that it gives Wincent Colaiuta the right to insult DB in person (including a pic of “[his] ugly mug”) - no, that’s in my book just as childish as anything else.)

I understand both DB and Wincent. DB wanted to warn people about the fragility of the system, and Wincent wanted to warn people about what going to DB’s entry would do to them. I still respect both guys, but it’s safe to say neither came away from the problem without a sizable dent in their reputation; DB as a highly potent (very wide reach in terms of readership) and deliberate publisher of things that demonstrably will crash several different apps on your system (and if that’s not malicious, I don’t know what is) and Wincent as the kind of guy who would sink to the depths of very deliberate Ad hominem attacks. And what I want to know now is… was it worth it?