Roger Binns — Sat 22 February 2014

The dysfunction in the US healthcare system, especially around how everything gets paid for is well known. My health "insurer" [1] Anthem Blue Cross of California, a subsidiary of publicly traded Wellpoint has a new way [2] of bumping their profits.

They aren't allowed to do premium changes targeting individuals, but can do it for groups (eg age ranges, geographical areas). They group people into age ranges (eg 40-44, 45-49). When your age changes into the next range up you get a ~25% premium increase [3]. The clever bit is that they don't actually wait until your birthday and instead increase the premiums near the beginning of the year. Consequently a 39 year old pays the increased premiums of a 40 year old for on average 6 months. Across their customer base this adds up quickly.

California has a regulatory agency Department of Managed Healthcare who are the regulatory agency for my plan, so I submitted a complaint to them. Sadly I got the usual nonsense in return. Like many customer support organisations, they have 10 answers and no matter what the issue the goal is to give you the closest answer to your question no matter how relevant it actually is. The answer to me was about how they aren't a regulator, plans aren't regulated etc, which is rather comical given just how often they describe themselves as exactly that. At this point I give up and pay the penalty for having a birthday late in the year. Score one point for the system.

On the technical side, the DMHC approach is beyond comical. There is lots of use of the word "secure" as in "secure web portal" and "secure email". Their response to me was an email that looked exactly like malicious emails. It was an envelope image with "click here" in the middle, and no other information about sender, why I would want to, or what the heck was going on. It was only by examining the email headers and additional digital sleuthing I was able to work out that it was actually a legitimate email. Clicking the link gave an error while copying and pasting it into the browser worked. It then proceeded to force me to setup a username and password to read the email. I finally got to read the email answering something I didn't ask, and ignoring my actual issue. When I later wanted to reread the answer, reproduce it here etc I couldn't. I kept being told I had to go to my "Inbox" to do so without any indication as to where (or what for that matter) that inbox is. I also noted how several pages had a footer saying Copyright 2011 Microsoft. Nothing says "secure" like "we haven't updated this in many years".

[1]	What is provided doesn't really resemble actual insurance, and is closer to a payment and costs obfuscation mechanism.

[2]	Compare to the old ways and look at how many times they have been fined.

[3]	This is in addition to the historic 22% annual increases.

Category: misc – Tags: rant

Roger Binns — Fri 21 February 2014

I highly recommend the Hardcore History podcast. The presenter Dan Carlin is an amateur historian (ie no professional reputation to protect) thoroughly researching each subject. He then takes as much time as needed to cover various topics.

I tried to come up with a list of recommended episodes, but you really should listen to all of them - they are that good.

Category: misc – Tags: recommendation

Roger Binns — Sun 26 January 2014

There seems to me to be a pattern for how many Linux distributions gain prominence and then fade away. Here is a family tree up until 2012. Doing a distribution is a lot of work needing components like installers, package managers, pulling in upstreams regularly, configuration, security etc.

The genesis is a need not being met. It is fascinating what these have been historically ranging from how stable/fast moving they are, how they are built, preferring certain software (eg a particular gui like KDE), wanting a certain kind of community, targeting certain users or uses, and numerous other reasons.

What this means is that as a distro starts it has a reason, a focus and a way to see what work is necessary. The problems start once it becomes successful. It becomes a lot easier to add "one more thing" to the distro such as another package, another configuration option or even good old fashioned feature creep. This will gain more users and make the distro better.

But the larger distribution, more users and wider scope makes the distribution harder. The hardware it is used with, the software it interacts with, changes in upstream and the users all lead to far more work. Every change breaks something, but not changing pieces also breaks due to changes in others. The symptoms of this show up in the bug trackers with increasing numbers of open or abandoned tickets.

Some distros respond by narrowing their audience (eg charging for it, restricting use cases, narrowing hardware and software etc). Others have their developers pull back into the work they are most interested in leaving the other parts languishing. Sometimes politics break out as various parties fight for what they think is important.

Ultimately, people then see their needs not being met causing a whole new cycle of distros.

Category: misc – Tags: linux

Roger Binns — Mon 20 January 2014

Every year some some Monarch butterflies overwinter in Santa Cruz. I finally went to have a look.

There weren't quite as many as I expected but that is probably due to the weather and the afternoon visit.

2014 Monarchs

Photos along with some of West Cliff Drive and the sky. The video (no audio) is looking up and around. It is a bit shaky due to being zoomed in and image stabilisation!

Category: misc

Roger Binns — Thu 02 January 2014

This is a story I reread about once a year and recommend to everyone who will listen. In 2007 some South Africans took their motorbikes around Angola. There are lots of pictures, stories about the Angolan people, touching parts, motorbiking and just an overall wonderful read.

The first part is here. Part two is a few posts down. That part then has links to each successive part.

Category: misc – Tags: recommendation

Roger Binns — Sat 28 December 2013

I have two active open source projects, and have been hosting them at Google Code. Now I'm moving them to Github. I'm still tidying up odds and ends.

Google Code (old home)	Github (new home)
https://code.google.com/p/apsw/	https://github.com/rogerbinns/apsw
https://code.google.com/p/java-mini-python/	https://github.com/rogerbinns/jia-mini-python

So let's start with some of the good things about Google Code:

• Mercurial: I prefer Mercurial as my DVCS of choice, and it is well supported.

• Decent Web Interface: Because code hosting sites are built by developers they tend to have idiosyncratic usability (architecture astronaut style), with Google Code being the least worst. For example on Github you can't even sort issues by priority. It is completely absurd.

• Multiple repositories per project: The popular hosting services have an issue tracker, wiki, links etc per project. With the exception of Google Code, you only get one source repository per project. DVCS encourages a style of single purpose smaller repositories versus the large agglomeration that was more typical in the subversion and CVS days.

  It is far more pleasant being able to use a single issue tracker, wiki etc for a group of related source repositories. Only Google Code does this.

So why leave?

• Downloads terminated: I have 14 files per release of APSW (most are Windows binaries since Windows developers rarely have compilers and related installed) and one for the other project. Google no longer want downloads, yet that is the primary way others use my projects. Google also do not believe in supporting Linux for Drive, not to mention that it is a terrible alternative.
• No future: There is no indication of any ongoing interest in Google Code and they refuse to take money for it. They keep shutting down services, and it is good practise to not be dependent on them. (No customer service, erroneous disabling of accounts etc.)

There are three choices for where to go:

• Sourceforge: No chance
• Bitbucket: I used them in the past, but they couldn't support personal and corporate use at the same time. They supported Mercurial, but Atlassian means an enterprisey design (I hate using Jira). Most importantly when I asked if they would guarantee availability of a download service for any period of time they said they would not. So they are out.
• Github: There are many things I don't like about Github, but at the end of the day they are the least worst, and only practical alternative.

This is how I converted my projects to github:

• Use fast-export to convert the Mercurial history to Git. (In theory you can talk Mercurial to Github but it isn't worth it. Also THG lost the ability to do line by line commits.)

• Use github pages to generate documentation into. However do not follow all those instructions - in particular the gh-pages branch needs to be created as an orphan as it has nothing to do with the master branch and its files. (Better instructions).

  The pages didn't render correctly, which was because they returned 404 for stylesheets and images. You have to do some magic to fix it.

• Use Google Code Issues Migrator to copy all existing issues over to Github and keep the same ids.

• Grep the source tree for all mentions of `code.google` and fix them.

• Edit the projects at Google Code to say they have moved

Before doing the real projects I experimented on a test repository to make sure that the documentation and releases worked. Sadly releases have to be done manually because there don't appear to be any usable command line clients (not even github's one) and none of the libraries I looked at did releases either.

Category: misc – Tags: github, apsw, google

Roger Binns — Mon 23 December 2013

There is lots of debate over Apple's success mainly about quantity (Android's sweet spot) vs quality/revenue (Apple's sweet spot).

I used Fing to see what devices were on the network on a plane and at a hotel. You can freely download it.

Category: misc – Tags: apple

Roger Binns — Tue 15 October 2013

The Santa Cruz wharf is turning 100 and there were some celebrations. There were some cool old cars, various exhibits including old photos, and various people speaking about things that didn't interest me. You can see some old photos, as well as details on the six different wharves here. While cycling on West Cliff Drive later, there was a spot inundated with birds.

2013 Santa Cruz Day

Birds ...

Category: misc

Roger Binns — Thu 26 September 2013

That is what Github tells the world about me. It isn't true and they won't let me change it. The problem area I am referring to is Java. The implication is that I have only one language talent, and implicitly that I endorse Java. While Java was a good solution in its first half-decade of life, it has been an increasingly poor solution since then, in my opinion. I did ask Github support to remove that, and they refused.

They "calculate" it from your public Github activity. Not even that - they only calculate it from your public activity on public projects that don't belong to an organisation. For work I did a whole bunch of C# and Python for a public Unity plugin but even that doesn't dilute the Java.

Github refuse to consider putting your private activity into that calculation. We'd have no problem with that at all. Heck we are hiring and would want people to see that Python is something we do a lot of, as well as Javascript, CSS, HTML, Objective-C, C and even on occasion Java when doing Android work. The Github profile should help viewers get a better understanding of the person, not malign them.

Category: misc

Roger Binns — Sun 01 September 2013

At work I've been doing a lot more frontend work. This involves writing HTML templates, CSS and Javascript. I also do the backend work (web services, databases, processing) and my experience is that the more you can see at once, the more productive you can be [1]. This involves multiple terminals, browsers, admin tools, DOM inspectors, consoles and editors.

For many years I've always used the biggest monitors I could afford/find [2]. There are various reports of multi-monitor productivity, but it is hard to distinguish between total display real estate versus the number of monitors. For me dual monitors has been how I increase my display real estate. (Obligatory Onion, web coding experience, engineering culture)

My motherboard has 4 video outputs (3 digital, one analogue) so adding a third monitor should be a no brainer. Heck there is even a video showing that it works just fine. I purchased a third monitor from Costco, and plugged it in to the VGA port (I needed to order a digital cable so it was a stopgap). It didn't work, with me ending up with 0, 1 or 2 working displays but never 3. Even more amusing was how confused everything got - the BIOS boot seems to pick the oldest connector technology to display on, while Linux would keep remembering which display was primary in some convoluted way that meant it was almost always wrong.

Eventually I tracked down the problem. Some programmable hardware known as a CRTC is needed to read the display memory at a certain rate suitable for the outputs it is connected to. Despite having 4 outputs, there are only 2 CRTCs. A CRTC can be hooked up to multiple outputs providing the monitor/output clocking is identical which usually requires using identical monitors (the same resolution is not sufficient).

With a heavy heart I decided to retire my smaller 16:10 monitor and get another monitor from Costco to replace it [3]. I now had two identical monitors that could share a CRTC and my original largest 16:10 to use the other one. Because of connectors and cables, my largest needed to use the DisplayPort connection with an adapter to HDMI.

You know what is coming next - the display wouldn't get a signal. It turns out that not only did they cheap out on the CRTCs, but they also cheaped out on the DisplayPort connection. Despite there being a spare CRTC and DisplayPort supporting multiple final outputs, they didn't bother. I had to buy an active adapter.

Finally after all that my 3 screens work. I have a 28 inch 16:10 display in the centre (1920x1280), and 27 inch 16:9 screens on either side (1920x1080). Except under Windows which detects all 3 screens just fine, but refuses to save the settings when you enable the third. I don't use Windows for real work so it doesn't matter.

What should have taken 30 minutes turned into a several week saga. Apparently computers are supposed to increase productivity.

[1]

When I first started programming as a kid on Apple IIs and Sinclair Spectrums, the screens were small and you'd be lucky to get something like 32 x 20 characters on the screen. There was the slow trend of monitors getting slightly larger - 11 inches being replaced by 12, 12 by 13 etc. I don't remember those as unproductive times. By 2000 I was spending thousands on 19 and 21 inch monitors when I could.

[2]

When working professionally in the 90s my colleagues got various workstations. I picked the NCD 19c which was a whopping 19 inch display, 1280 x 1024 resolution and an X terminal (dumb display device). The display was great and I had run apps all over the place, displaying to the terminal. I didn't switch to a different primary device until 1999 or so.

[3]

There was also a detour via Nvidia. The only PC game I play is 10 years old and my work is mostly text editors, browsers and terminals. This doesn't require high end acceleration. I got an Nvidia card (low end 6100). It had two outputs and in theory would work with the Intel HD4000 for the third monitor. In practise things didn't work well, especially on Linux where Nvidia's driver doesn't support standard display drivers, and is a closed binary so only Nvidia can add that functionality. It turns out there is a beta driver that did support it, but then refused to cooperate with the Intel driver. On Windows it worked fine. I got a second Nvidia card since they claimed it would work via a "mosaic" mode. After eventually getting the right voodoo in the configuration (and it working fine on Windows), their driver refused to do it on the grounds that the chipset wasn't authorised, implying that if I had spent $400 per card then they'd be okay doing it. The cards were also noisy. I gave up on Nvidia and got a quieter machine back and no arbitrary drivers that error on authorisations.

Category: misc