Perette's Journal: 2012

1. The Coder

2012-01-05 09:39 (Thursday) journal

For some reason I’ve had Kenny Roger’s The Gambler running through my head, though in a slight variation:

You've got to know when to malloc,
    Know when to calloc,
    Know when to check for NULL...
    When the code is run.

    You never count your array
    without checking out the length first
    There's no need to be a'crashing,
    when you're doin' sums.

2. SOPA & the Greedy

2012-01-18 16:14 (Wednesday) journal

So the media companies, owned and lead by the rich superwealthy, want SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) so that the rest of us can’t pirate things and have to pay for them. These are companies like Time Warner that charge exorbitant rates for cable TV and other entertainment.

But we all know we’re being screwed everytime we pay the cable bill, or $20 for another copy of a 70-year-old Walt Disney movie (but now on the latest media format). But what do we do about it? We grumble, piss and moan, and most of us pay it. And a few go pirate things, because they’re fighting being screwed with screwing back.

But what’s the real solution? On our end, the real solution is to stop watching, stop paying. Everytime you pay an overinflated cable bill, you’re consenting to their fees. So fuck’em, tell them to shove their fees. Go to NetFlix, or read a book.

The solution on their end? Well, SOPA. They’ve got the money, they’ve got the power to buy the laws, they’ve got the power to enforce their extortion. Unless, of course, we opt-out of it altogether and go read a book, or go to a coffee shop and talk to people, maybe gather some friends—while we’re at it, we can start planning a revolt. Maybe when they’ve made it too expensive to dull ourselves over with the glowing glass eye or fuckbook on the interwebs, we’ll have time to devote to problems of our country and the way things (don’t) get solved, maybe even realize things never get fixed by asking politely.

And then we’ll come to the realization that we the masses need to be a threat. We need to own guns and be ready to exercise our duty to use them to overthrow things when they go wrong. It’s not that I want to go risk my life fighting in a war at home, just that things aren’t going to get better… because what’s forcing them to get better? Our owning firearms and having the (apparent) willingness to use them creates the power that gets us be listened to.

And SOPA? The greedy should really know better. As long as we’re distracted with our bread an circuses, they can keep screwing us in the financial markets, and turning our tax dollars into all kinds of tax incentives and pork-belly spending and wars that aren’t in our interests but somehow end up lining their own pockets.

So please, you greedy sons of a bitches, come take away what poor, meager entertainment I get in the name of keeping a few dollars away from the pirates. Take away the thing that keeps the rest of my ilk preoccupied, the thing that you use to push your ideas and agendas into the masses' minds. Take away the thing that distracts us after a hard days slaving at making you fuckers money, with little enough for our own—the masses need more anger at you after the last few years.

Kill SOPA, and things will just drag on as they’ve been. Pass SOPA, and it’ll be one more thing in the long train of abuses and usurpations that step by step are pushing us toward the next revolution. I say, full steam ahead.

3. Coding foo

2012-02-02 20:15 (Thursday) journal

CRC calculation of arbitrary length polynomials and values in a language with no native binary operators or loops (only recursion): fun!

4. Fix failure, Cost of war

2012-03-01 23:04 (Thursday) journal

Problems with Fishie Car’s stereo lately, not working with the MP3 player quite correctly. I screwed with it a bunch, tried to diagnose it, but no luck. There are actually things I can’t fix. But I can build a pretty nice wiring harness for a new stereo.

Cost of war: $1.3T. But that’s actual spending; when considering the hidden and future costs, it’s speculated to be $4–6T. The US population is apx 310M, 210M of them adult.

Existing costs: ~4,200/person
                 $6,200/adult.
Estimated real cost: ~$12,900–19,350/person
                      $19,000–28,575/adult

That money could have made a big dent in all of our energy budgets as prices increases, and that’s before considering the price increases that are due to the massive consumption of oil by the war itself, thus diminishing supplies and driving up costs it was supposed to keep down.

I know they want us to believe this was about how we’re the good guys and needed to get the bad guy, and if not that then we were over there to liberate the Middle East. And if nothing else, we should have been happy to have the war because it would get us access to cheap oil. Personally, I don’t buy any of it. The only ones that benefitted were the war profiteering companies of the military-industrial complex and the rich that own and run them.

Why didn’t we revolt?

5. gnutls build failure

2012-03-18 17:41 (Sunday) journal

Can’t find libnettle even with --with-libnettle-prefix=<whatever>, but libnettle is bloody well there? Then libnettle is built wrong; install libgmp, then for nettle rerun ./configure, make, and make install; this will get you hogweed, and you can finally get ./configure to work for gnutls.

Wouldn’t it be great if it ./configure failed in a more intuitive way? Like, indicating nettle was incompatible rather than missing?

6. Why I don't like "clever" things

2012-03-20 15:35 (Tuesday) journal

You’d think as a brainy type myself, I’d like clever solutions to things. I do like good solutions, and good ways of achieving a goal; I like well-written, solid code. I’m not sure about “clever”, though.

“Clever” (at least as used in software) has this sort of dark underbelly, a sneaky sort of implication that one achieved something either via a short-cut to save time and effort, or achieved the impossible by bending rules. Clever scientists coming up with ways to discover the Higgs bozon, I approve of. Clever CSS ideas like sprites (sometimes called “CSS hacks”, “tricks”, or other giveaways that they aren’t cricket), though they might save some bandwidth, do so by making code unmaintainable. Clever ways of getting a browser to display something often aren’t portable. Clever coding doesn’t always yield understandable code (and thus makes it bug-prone, IMO), and thus is usually just not worth it.

7. Dear Microsoft

2012-03-21 16:16 (Wednesday) journal

Dear Microsoft,

A few points to clear up:

Typing ^C when I have nothing selected is probably a mistake, not actual intent to select empty text for later pasting. In fact, it’s rather likely that it was intended to be ^V and paste in some text, which I’ll now have to go find, select, and cut/copy again. Grr.

When manipulating a scrollbar, if the pointer slips off the scrollbar but I’m still holding the button down– it’s because I was focusing on the content, not carefully keeping the mouse pointer on the scrollbar. It does not mean I’ve decided I want to go back to scroll back to the original viewpoint.

The registry was a bad idea. But I suspect you realized that long ago. How long does Bill have to have been gone before you give up on that failed idea?

IE8, IE9… Nice. Making progress. Thank you.

.NET, also nice. C# clearly has C, Java, and Pascal roots, and I like all of them. And you’ve vetted the C++ illegibility, yay! Making all the .NET languages cross-link and be able to share code is one of those things that the open source world doesn’t seem to be up to. Well done.

Closing the last window of an application does not mean I want to quit—sometimes I’m just closing it because I want to work on something else. This can be a real nuisance for web browsers (where closing the application loses authentication cookies) and programs not in the task bar, which I then have to hunt down again to re-open. In other cases, there’s load time in launching the application that’s annoying.

Thanks,

Perette

8. pianod

2012-03-22 09:00 (Thursday) journal

pianod homepage

9. Occupy movement and tooth decay

2012-03-26 09:21 (Monday) journal

Occupy Wallstreet was about the capitalist abuse of the worker, making us work long hours for low wages, keeping all the profit for themselves, not addressing all the out of work people.

The stress of those conditions causes insomnia in some people, like me.

Medication for insomnia cause dry mouth.

Saliva is antibacterial, so dry mouths are subject to more bacteria.

Oral bacterial cause tooth decay.

It really seems stupid to me that we keep fighting symptoms instead of addressing the problems, yet we do it all the time. It seems backward that I’ll spend 4 hours of wages to talk to a counselor to help me cope with work, when 4 hours of rest are probably what the answer truly is.

10. Training tools

2012-04-05 14:38 (Thursday) journal

A co-worker send this along as useful design tips. It really is spot-on, and funny as shit. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/shopping_cart

11. The damage done unknowingly...

2012-04-10 08:13 (Tuesday) journal

It’s odd being me. The values I have, the way I process information, the way I interact with others, the way I learn things (especially interpersonal skills) seem different from the rest of everybody. Not that I’m completely unique of different; what I want out of life is to be happy—but if you compare how I think that can be achieved, it’s not the standard response you’ll get.

The best explanation I’ve found so far is the likelihood of Asperger’s (“AS”), although it’s a sort of useless diagnosis: it explains but doesn’t change anything. As a side note, an interesting effect I’ve experienced is reduction in AS-type traits when living without testosterone (“T”), including being less goal oriented, interest in being social, experience of emotions, loss of ability to lose myself in interesting projects. These have all returned since being on T for a waning sex drive, with the nice effect of anxiety being less overwhelming at the expense of having all emotions muted (it’s like they’re the other side of a strong tempered-glass wall, where I can see them and vaguely hear them, but not enough to get my interest). But a sample of two (one being T removal circa 1993, the other the subsequent restoration circa 2009) is not good science, which makes it difficult to trust the T datapoint, because it could be coincidence. But I’ve digressed.

When I was struggling to find enough business in 2009/2010, David and his daughter persuaded me that I should stop living an open life, and not write about myself in this journal anymore. It didn’t make sense then, as living my life openly has always seemed to improve it. Closets and all that. But I also recognize my own limitations, especially interpersonal ones—I used to talk with Jan about this, he would give good critical feedback that helped me understand how my behaviors are interpreted by others and thus helped me grow and change.

In acquiescing, I think I may have allowed an important tool to be taken away. Writing in this journal, whether or not anyone actually reads or cares what I write, nevertheless presents the possibility of people reading it. It’s thus in my interest to be clear about my feelings and experiences. Writing about those required I think about them and sort them out, to have sufficient understanding that it’s possible to write coherently about what I experience or how I perceive the world. In retrospect, it seems likely this was probably one of the processes that helped me understand myself, reflect on it, and to grow and adapt.

Of course, discontinuation of journal writing approximately correlates with resuming T, so it could be that. Back to 2 data points, bad science, can I trust any of it? And there’s no reason they can’t both be influential.

I won’t say I believe the journal is a resolve-all solution. It’s slow, resource intensive (taking time and effort to form my words), deliberate and not spontaneous. But if we assume the Asperger’s premise is true, then considering AS’s stereotype (inflexible, procedural, resisting change) then any change at all is a good step. Over the last 2 years, I’ve shown remission of many of the AS traits, a regression in personality—but more than that, a distinct lack of interest or ability in personality revision or improvement. I have no way of being sure or proving it, but I’m nevertheless suspicious that without Jan’s feedback, and without writing in my journal to do it myself, the underlying feedback processes that create change are gone.

12. The real Killroys

2012-04-10 21:22 (Tuesday) journal

In my job recently I’ve been doing some analytic setup and tracking stuff. For those unacquainted, I’m setting up the stuff that allows websites to follow what you’re doing, and report that data later later on—typically in summary form, but they could track individually.

In the past I’ve dismissed the seeming comspiracy minded thoughts of friends like fuschia; as much as I respected there was potential for abuse, I thought she and her kind were probably a little over zealous on the argument. I am not of that mistaken opinion any longer.

Part of why I thought it was tolerable was that it was a merchant I chose to do business with, or consider doing business with. This is not a valid argument. In the early form, social sites worked by getting webmasters to add links to their sites (you’ll find a few of these around my website). The sites typically had button graphics, but webmasters were savvy enough in those days to make and/or host their own image, thus preventing these social sites from “leaching” data every time somebody requested the button (when you request the image, your browser announces the site it is for).

Nowadays, webmasters either (a) aren’t smart enough, (b) don’t care, both resulting in more data collection.

The information gathering done by social media is more refined and more valuable (which justifies investing money in further refining the process).

So (c) data is collected more accurately, and (d) data is processed into more useful results.

The masses have bought into/been sold the idea of the social web, and so they’re happy to use it. Furthermore, the caliber of intellect/technological awareness of the average Internet user has declined—we’re no longer all brainy techies that have the ability to be skeptical about the reasons we’re given.

So (e) people are less resistant, and even worse, people (f) actively want social integration in the sites they use.

This last point means the social sites can be more aggressive. Instead of a static code snippet, the most recent ones use a script that runs on every page. (Part of the reason your old web browser/machine dogs down new sites—all the scripts.) And since the caliber of webmaster has dropped, many now being just average salespeople or whatnot, that works for them—they don’t have the capability to add custom code or prevent tracking. Not that they’d want to, because the social sites give them statistics and analysis in exchange for the abuse of their shoppers' privacy.

(g) the social sites collect more aggressively, (h) webmasters don’t resist or watch over their users, and in fact (i) webmasters buy into the “free” data access too.

This has caused a proliferation of social web sites—link sharing, social bookmarking, blogging, image sharing, etc. The hundreds of buttons available out there has resulted in meta-sites, sites whose “purpose” is supplying widgets that create the other buttons. For webmasters, they offer a simple, consistent way to add buttons for the other social sites—perfect for a webmaster who just wants it easy, doesn’t give a shit about his user’s privacy, just wants to increase his bottom line. And, guess what, after you add their script to your site they too collect data. In fact, the amount of data these fuckers must take home blows me away, because almost all the merchants I work with have taken to using them.

(j) The metasites offer nothing of their own, but harvest the data like wheat in August.

That merchants use Google Analytics to see what their users are up to does not bother me. It’s the data collection that’s under the guise of something else, and in particular, (j) really gives me the jitters.

The thing that really drove the point home recently though? For years, I suppose sites have been trying to sell me stuff, and I guess I habituated to the kinds of things they try to sell me. But now I work in the industry, and in the last few weeks I’ve been debugging and making small enhancements for our merchants. That means visitng a lot of websites to check the way a product displays, shop around a bit and make sure that new social media button looks okay, stuff like that.

And all of a sudden, Google Product Search (better known as Froogle) is broken. It doesn’t suggest RAM upgrades or a hard disc, it’s offering me clothing and lingerie, overpriced purses, baby strollers and clothing. It thinks i might want to buy shit I couldn’t care less about—but is spot-on with the websites I’ve been working on the last 2 weeks.

If I could, I’d just block a lot of the sites…but I need them to work to do my job. If there’s a silver lining in all this, it’s that at least I can go to bed knowing they’re data on me is presently hopelessly corrupt.

13. Pick any two

2012-04-23 09:26 (Monday) journal

I am reminded of an old engineer’s saying: Good, fast, cheap—pick any two.

I can have a job. It takes 40 hours of my week. I can do it to earn money, but it doesn’t make me happy. The projects don’t interest me; I wouldn’t do it if they didn’t pay me, or if I didn’t need the money. A job is an active process, it takes effort and energy—but it doesn’t make me happy. It’s just something I’m obligated to do to have the resources to survive.

I can perform the stabilizing skills that I learned in DBT and over the last few years—which, when it comes down to it, is vacuuming, making my own food, which in turn requires going shopping (preferably at the public market), keeping up with dishes, etc. (Part of the stabilizing influence of these is maintaining my life in good order, the other part is that it’s fairly rote, procedural work that gets me away from thinking and the machines.) It’s also just having veg time, watching TV or reading a book. These are passive activities; they don’t require major effort but don’t create happiness or unhappiness. But in that, they stabilize my emotions.

I can do things that interest me. This is things like interacting with others, participating in RKS, and building things of interest. Often it’s writing pieces of software, like the auction manager, the RKS website; other times it’s writing position pieces or thinking about how to take capitalism down. These are creative, and they require thought and effort—they are active, and draining. But doing them satisfies me, makes me happy.

All of these are “heavyweight” processes. They require substantial time commitments.

• Stability + personal interests leaves a problem with money.
• Stability + work leaves me unsatisfied with my life; I feel empty because I’m not pursuing any interests.
• Personal interests + work over stimulates me; I become ungrounded, I become so busy with ideas and interests I lose the ability to sleep, and from insomnia madness derives.

They are all required to allow me to enjoy a fufilling yet stable existence. Yet they simply don’t fit in the available time. I don’t see how to resolve this; the best I can guess is to either oscillate every few weeks between work + stability and work + interests, and seeing if I can modulate something useful out of that. But that seems like a shitty, stupid, and dangerous solution.

The other alternative is what seems to have been the de facto result, doing work + a half ass balance of the other two until I crash and burn, stacking up money as I go fast as I can; then switch to personal interests + stability as long as viable. But that leaves the eventual financial fears looming over my head, and creates massive turmoil around the transition points…It’s far from a good solution.

There must be a viable solution. I just can’t see what it is, or how to achieve it.

14. Spam

2012-04-23 22:46 (Monday) journal

So I just got an email that starts:

Did you receive the e-mail which we sent to you recently (copied here-below)? Please confirm since I have had problems lately with emails intercepted by spam-filters set too high.

Let me assure you, you bastard, that my spam filters are set at exactly the appropriate levels.

Perhaps I should reply to him via way of SpamCop, in hopes of encouraging cluefulness.

15. Funny man pages

2012-04-27 11:09 (Friday) journal

One thing I love sometimes is when things are written in a way that important inferences are left up to the reader:

 "If SO_LINGER is disabled and a close is issued, the system will process
 the close in a manner that allows the process to continue as quickly as
 possible."

In other words, if SO_LINGER is disabled and close is issued, the system may shitcan the rest of the data in the pipe in attempting to continue as quickly as possible.

16. A thought on social media

2012-05-12 18:59 (Saturday) journal

The idea of social media as metadata occurred to me today. I’m not sure it’s accurate, but it yields some interesting perspectives; in particular, people’s tendency to use social media to define the state of their lives. And it clarifies my feelings—perpetually tinkering with the metadata achieves nothing; there’s actual living to be done.

17. Better, or not?

2012-05-25 15:19 (Friday) journal

In C, you can treat any pointer as a void *. This behavior allows code that works with abstract chunks of data to accept that data without typecasting all over the place. Still, when you need that data back to what it originally was, you still need to typecast it to the right type.

C# is supposed to be higher-level language. C# is object-oriented, with everything other than a few numeric types derived from Object (and even those numeric types can be). There are no pointers; the language doesn’t offer them (though in reality, pretty much every object is a pointer).

The thing I find strange is that, although generics are available, at least in ASP.NET, I’m often typecasting Objects into other types, just like you typecast void *s back to their proper type in C. It’s ugly. And at least where I work now, there are functions all over the place that accept Object, and then immediately cast it into the proper type. It seems like bad practice; since everything can be converted into Object, there ends up being no type checking.

In some ways C# is brilliant; it’s taken the best of C, c#, Java, Pascal, Delphi and probably some others. But in this respect, it really doesn’t feel right.

18. Therapy costs

2012-06-11 09:23 (Monday) journal

Annual time spent in therapy, going to/from therapy, or working to earn money to pay for therapy: 17*5=85 hours = 10 work days

Wouldn’t it be more sensible to just take 2 more weeks of vacation, unpaid, and just skip the therapy?

19. Telemarketing causes self-enforced ignorance?

2012-06-15 16:49 (Friday) journal

Telemarketing, robocalls, public service announcements that tell you shit you already know, and all theother intrusive advertising have caused us to “raise our shields” against unwanted communication.

Positions that differ from our own also tend to be nuisances we don’t want to hear, though (if we are wrong) being corrected is good.

In training ourselves to defend against marketing, I think we’re probably mistakenly training ourselves to fend off all annoying communication—including communicating knowledge. This would explain why people with ridiculous positions seem to be getting ever better at retaining them in the face of evidence.

20. Perette's Razor

2012-06-27 22:48 (Wednesday) journal

I’ve been defining my scheme for what stays in my life, and what gets booted. I want a method that applies to activities, people/relationships, things and ideas. These three questions are the inputs to the decision:

1. Is this important? The test for “importance” is whether whatever it is will matter in 3 months, 6 months, or a year.

2. Does this make my life better? “Better” is defined as happier, improved quality of life, less stressful, more enjoyment… notably, not simply convenience.

3. Is this true? (In relationships, “genuine” might be a better choice of word. Referring to activities, “honest” may be the best fit.) This one is harder to define, because allegory or symbolism may have value while not literally true, and many things have shades of gray. But outright failing this test does have a clarity about it.

The gray in there is how I weigh the various questions for different scenarios.

21. Anti-consumerism project

2012-07-25 23:03 (Wednesday) journal

I give you American Bedwetter.

22. Dear Client

2012-07-27 12:26 (Friday) journal

Dear Potential Client,

Thank you for having me do your web development, but let’s get a few thing straight.

When I deliver your website, it’ll look like the mock-up on modern browsers. It will look similar on older browsers, but not exactly the same. The rounded corners you requested may be squared off, the gradients may be solid colors. Before you say, “Well then, you’re a poor web designer,” let me explain why I’m going build your site this way.

I’m going use the latest CSS support available, utilizing CSS3 features like columns, gradients, and rounded corners. Older browsers, not knowing what these are, will ignore them and render single columns, single colors, square corners, etc. The features I’ll use work on recent machines and support is always growing.

The alternative is to use workarounds to make older browsers do these features. Why is this a bad idea?

First off, they are hacks. Many require extra mark-up, which adds to the page weight, slowing visitors down and damaging the user experience. In addition to transfer time, the complexity slows rendering speed—particularly on old machines, which were the source of the original concern. You’re just trading a minor cosmetic variance for a usability one. And before you say, “But that’s how it used to be done,” let me address that point.

The web continues to evolve steadily, and websites become increasingly complex along with it. Hack A may have worked on its own, but now to make the site do what you want, it requires Hack A, Hack B, and Hack C. And they probably don’t play nice together, so to make it work requires Hack D and E. With that many hacks, there are probably some bugs or erratic behaviors that slip through. Do you want the bugs, or are you adamant about the rounded corners?

In addition, these don’t work reliably. The user has a weird font size override set, the size of your header changes, and—oh dear—the gradient image needs to be expanded, or doesn’t look right because it’s only using part of it or the rest is now cut off. There’s CSS fixes for that—’background-stretch', I think it is—except that’s a newer element, and if I’m depending on newer elements, I might as well use CSS gradients in the first place.

Then there’s maintainability. If the want changes to header, the same problems I just mentioned exist. I’ll have cut you a new gradient image, instead of just changing your CSS file. And with all these hacks, things get confusing, and when someone else looks at the code, they’re going to scratch their head thinking ‘WTF?’. Even with the comments.

Instead of the hacks, let me customize styles for mobile and print so your site will look decent on mobile devices and when printed. It’s a much better use of my time.

So verily, I say to thee, accept that your modern site will use modern design, and begone with the hacks. I’ll pay attention to my use of fallbacks to ensure your site will still look okay on the old platforms. And unless you’ve got a crapload of tracking pixels on there, it’ll probably still be usable on old hardware.

If this philosophy is not in line with yours, please take your business elsewhere.

sigh If only it could be true. But I work for someone else.

23. Ambiguity over Apple

2012-07-31 20:48 (Tuesday) journal

I just got back from the Apple store, my laptop Stefanie having reported “Service Battery”. I have just a month left on AppleCare, so just in time, I guess. The battery really didn’t seem to be doing anything wrong, just like the stupid SES light in a car.

They looked at a few diagnostics, said the battery was underperforming, and swapped it out. No screwing around, no suggesting I run full discharges/recharges, no claiming “it’s right at the edge, so we can’t do anything,” or “it’s just the normal aging.” Instead, “It’s the battery, you have AppleCare, you get a new one. Done.” There’s a pleasantness about that.

The flipside is I don’t feel right about Apple’s economics. Don’t get me wrong, I think the products are a fair deal—they’re not cheap, but you don’t get cheap. And there’s service.

But Apple is sitting on $100 billion. In cash, investments and other liquid forms; moneyish things, not buildings and business supplies. But Apple doesn’t pay their staff well, at least not the retail folk. I guess it’s not bad for a retail job, but these are more than just retail schmucks. They’re hardware gurus, software gurus, educators. And Apple’s gotten bad press about the contractors they use, like Foxconn and badly paid workers in nightmare working conditions, to the point of workers committing suicide regularly. Come on, Apple, you’re the people that gave us “Think Different.” How about thinking different about capitalism?

I kind of understand Apple’s hoarding money; I’m the same way. I think I should be more willing to donate to good causes, share what I have—but after the mental breakdown at Heidelberg, I can’t do it. It seems like a good idea, but when the moment comes, I see giving directly imperiling my future—I could relapse at any time. And so I hoard money. Apple had its struggles in the 90s, barely scraping by; there was a lawsuit against Microsoft that supplied barely enough liquidity to get by. And then there was OS X, the iBooks and iMacs and iPods in bright berry colors, and Apple turned its fortunes around.

So in 12 years Apple went from destitute to $100B. That’s averaging $8B/year, although it’s been exponential so it’s actually been more than that in recent years.

I don’t know what Apple’s headcount is, but the 'net says were 363 Apple retail stores in January 2012. At 100 head/store, which seems reasonable, that’s 36K people. Then there’s phone support, business people, engineers… Let’s say 100,000 total, which could probably include some of the contractors like Foxconn. If Apple reduced its profiteering by just $1B, they could pay every one of those people $10,000 more. These are the people that make Apple what it is, the people who are doing the work—whether it’s designing the machines, flogging them to customers, helping people learn to use them, all that stuff.

It is a real world example of the imbalanced world of Fight Club. The people with the money, have money and so have the power; they use that power to keep acruing more money. Pay the people doing the actual work as little as you can. This is a sick, sick system. As a system, it disgusts me; for Apple, it disappoints me, and leaves me with mixed feelings about my love of Apple products and service. I’m buying from the evil empire.

Update: Apple Retail Store Staff Set to Gain Raises of Up to 25% — Thanks Jan!

24. RIP Mugenshi

2012-09-14 21:22 (Friday) journal

Mugenshi suffered the iBook ISL 6225CA chip solder joint loosening with age problem today. I tried soldering, but no go… I finally gave up after 3 tries and I think I bent a pin.

She was a fair machine, providing about 3.5 years service as my laptop and then another 3 as the home automation server. For the last several years she was endowed with tattoos of Cybergirl on her top. Over her lifetime, she contributed to finding optimal golomb rulers, did protein folding for disease research, and contributed to cleaner water among various other projects. Her name meant “unbounded truth” (or at least was supposed to mean that).

In her ending, Mugenshi’s parts will hopefully go to help other machines. Her hard drive and battery have already been reallocated; parts available include: screen, upper case w/ speakers & trackpad assembly, DVD combo drive (I think it’s DVD read, CD Read/write), fan, 1GB PC 2700 stick, DC in board, keyboard.

I am now determining how to go forward. If anyone is interested in upgrading their laptop (or has an extra around), I might consider buying it if the price is fair. Alas, most of the used Mac prices on Ebay, Craigslist, etc., are absolutely outrageous. There’s stuff that is going for more than higher-speced brand new hardware.

In the mean time, I have put Odayaka into service again.

25. My motherboard went, so I got a new hard drive

2012-09-15 23:57 (Saturday) journal

Since Mugenshi died, I stuffed her hard drive into Odayaka and put it into service. It’s sort of an enigma: despite being older, Odayaka has a faster processor than Mugenshi (but less memory). It’s also limited to USB 1.1, which has a max throughput of 12 Mbps (really, really, really slow). As a file server, not viable.

So I acquired a little home NAS (network attached storage, a shared network hard drive) that’s now set up and transferring 600GB of data from the old USB disc unit. It seems to be running okay so far; Stefanie is having fun saturating the network to 85% of capacity for the file transfer.

26. Dear Forum Website

2012-09-20 15:29 (Thursday) journal

Thanks for operating your forum (or on-line classroom, or social networking, or whatever) website of whatever topic it is. It’s great to have a place to discuss (or learn or whatever) topics like these on the Internet.

I have some concerns about your password requirements though. Specifically, the requirements that I include a lowercase letter, uppercase letter, a digit, one Cyrillic character and one mathematical symbol from the Unicode math set; additionally the weekly change requirement.

I find this overkill because your website isn’t selling anything. I can’t send e-mail from it. You do not have my credit card information. Personally, even if you did have additional risk exposure, I’d like you to let me set my own password requirements. If I’m stupid enough to use my birthday as the password to access my credit card number, that’s my problem. But okay, I could grasp that. You’re doing the masses a favor not letting them stoop to their standard stupid decisions.

But what’s the risk on your forum (or classroom or networking or whatever) site? If someone hacks my account, they’ll post a little spam until you reset or shut off the acount? I know spam is a pain in the ass, but I think it’s preferable to adhering to these ridiculous password requirements.

Please, in the next site update, put a little thought into risk assessment before setting user requirements. If you were serving on-line banking, then I could understand crazy password requirements. But since you’re not securing high-risk data, you don’t need high-security passwords. What I’m trying to say, is your password requirements should be in line with the damage risk should the data be compromised. Why? Because as more sites demand high-security passwords, it increases the likelihood your visitors—many of them the aforementioned masses—will reuse the same “high-security” password all over the place because they can’t/don’t want to remember multiples. That increases risk, not decreases, because when one site gets compromised and the passwords stolen, the Bad Guys end up with a whole bunch of useful passwords to lots of sites.

So let us use crappy passwords. We both know you haven’t got a fleet of security techs fighting off the bad guys, so stop creating a gold mine of data for the bad guys to steal. Thanks.

27. The pain of 105%

2012-12-10 08:10 (Monday) journal

I think I’m near the end of my job with UniteU. I’ve been having trouble getting out of bed in the mornings, and I’ve realized it’s fear of going to work. When I think about going for a walk, it sounds fun—but then when I think about work, I just want to… I sort of stop thinking, like if I could only sufficiently stop thinking then time would stop and it would never come to pass.

I think the trouble I’m having is how standards and limits are set, both within me and within my employer (or my perception of my employer): if they give me hard projects, I can “give 110%”—that is, I can push into new knowledge, areas I’m not confident in where I’ve got to do research, educated guesswork and trials. Where I’m not working from my knowledge, but instead both trying to build something and assemble the information to enable me to build that thing. That’s very different from building something using knowledge I already have, where I’m working with confidence and can concentrate on craftsmanship.

Running in that “110%” state is possible. For a while, you can push the limits and do some extra. Temporarily, I think these are okay—hard and stressful, sure, but it’s these times that we come out saying, “Damn, I didn’t think I could do that—I learned something today.”

But you can’t do that sustained. Like an animal in the wild, you don’t run at don’t-get-eaten speed all the time, and if you try then sooner or later you’ll run out of energy. (And if it’s then that the lion shows up, you’re screwed.) Running at 110%, you eventually become exhausted and can’t do it. Not only that, you need to recuperate from pushing the limits, and that means stopping and resting, taking it easy for a while. Whether it’s physical or intellectual, these same rules apply, but in practice we don’t seem to do so. Why?

When it comes to intellectual skills, stress is spread over a larger time. It’s week after week that hurts, not like a 5-minute burst of energy producing lactic acid. And there’s no physical pain like lactic acid, it’s all subtle chemical changes with the most noticeable outward changes being our affect, our outlook on life. So where’s the measurable, quantifiable evidence of exhaustion? There is none.

If it was a one-day thing, it would seem obvious we went beyond. But when it’s spread over such a large time, it seems like it’s the baseline. We hit the wall and wonder on what’s wrong, asking how we achieved before but can’t now. “If I could do that much for the last few months, why can’t I do the same thing today?” And our employers, or our perception of our employers, asks the same thing of us. And what do we point to? How do we explain we’re not just “slacking off” today?

How do we convey that we’ve reached the point of exhaustion, and that it’s not just a 15-minute break we need, not just knocking off a few hours early one day. There’s day after day of accumulated overshoot, and it’s got to be made up for—but it no longer seems like overshoot, it seems like it’s just average. And if we just can’t do the average anymore, then it’s us that’s broken, not the expectations.