The Twilight Report

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them...To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them, to forget any facts which become inconvenient.

George Orwell 1984

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction and division of society.

John Adams

Doublethink is also the name I chose for my web server at work. It is named for the application it runs, which collates information collected by BigBrother (a component of our tool software which tracks usage) and presents it in a readable way. At some point I inherited a Twiki which is also hosted on doublethink (the machine).

Last year when complaints about the web servers performance were made, I said that the machine needed to be put on a faster network. There is no technical reason why this cannot be done. When I'm at home and I need a new fast Ethernet port, I go to Best Buy and purchase one... here is one for $39.99 [broken link]. The reason this cannot be done at work is that there is security on the port at work so that the IT department can charge us per computer instead by bandwidth. Charging by bandwidth would make sense, since that is the service they are providing, not use of the computer. That is neither hear nor there.

So, as mentioned earlier, there was an "experiemnt" on Wednesday to see if the web server would run faster, as I said it would, on the faster network. The LAN team's position is that the performance problems have nothing to do with bandwidth, but the speed of the machine. Put succinctly, this is rubbish. I knew this, but I ran the test anyway, and sure enough twiki and doublethink (the application) ran much faster on the faster network than it had on the slower network.

I felt vindicated by this result and assumed that we could now push to get port security turned off in my office. I know this has happened for other high priority projects, and now that the managers are using twiki, this has become a high priority.

The guy who is spearheading this little adventure just came by my office to tell me that they are getting me a new computer to replace doublethink (the server). Normally this would fill me with rage because they are obviously not listening to me, but because of recent events I view the entire affair with a rather comforting sense of detachment. Why should I complain, after all, if they give me a new computer? Even if I didn't ask for it.

Still the original doublethink - still humming underneath my desk for now - and I have been through a lot and it will be sad to see her go.