Roger Binns — Wed 10 April 2019

Category: misc – Tags: review

Roger Binns — Thu 28 February 2019

I've been wondering what best practise for handling defaults is. In software there are generally 3 values: zero, one, or many. As a consequence developers often pick a sensible number for "many", and allow configuration to change it.

Eventually defaults permeate the code, settings, user interfaces, product documentation, user forums, and search engine results. It spreads not from a single source of truth that tracks and propagates changes, but by being arbitrarily copied between systems.

As time passes, the default values need to change due to circumstances and experience. New features make existing values need refinement, while new interactions complicate matters.

The usual solution is to bump the major version and have humans, code, and documentation deal with changes. The effort of doing major version upgrades especially all the setting changes is what makes so many of us resistant to do major version upgrades.

Starting software after a version upgrade is always a pain. Sometimes you are pleasantly surprised that it just works, but usually the logs are full of complaints about settings, things that previously worked no longer working and general yak shaving.

Postfix has a compatibility level to help defer the effort after a major version upgrade, but you are still on the hook for the upgrade changes.

An anti-pattern is software that generates an initial config file for you. It does have a very short path between default settings and the generated config file, usually including comments and explanations in that file. This is fantastic to start with.

But it causes problems in time. The settings, comments and explanations become wrong. Looking at a config file that is a few years old is an exercise in archaeology and contradictions, requiring consulting the file, warning/error messages, logs, wikis, and other documentation.

So far the best I have is to prefer more 'automatic' settings, and keep the number of settings to a minimum.

Category: misc

Roger Binns — Wed 18 November 2015

A shocking time has come - I've given up Emacs, after using it for 20 years. When interviewing developers, one of the questions I ask is about their favourite editor. I don't care what the answer is, but I do very much care about why it is. An editor is a fundamental part of developer productivity, so I want to hear about the candidate caring about their own productivity and trying to improve it on an ongoing basis.

The irony is that I was using the same editor for decades. I did keep trying to find improvements, but never could. There are two sides to Emacs - one is as a competent & coherent editor, and the other is "living" in it. It has builtin web browsing, image viewing, email and news support, terminal emulators etc. I was never one of those.

Before Emacs I used vi. Its modal interface, small size, and availability on all systems make it a good tool. However it was text console only, and didn't do colour, menus, multiple files or other useful functionality. (It does now.) vi does have a learning curve - I estimate it takes about 4 years to be good with it, and 8 years to be an expert!

I had known about Emacs for a while, but it was text console only, and didn't do colour, or menus. Each attempt to use it left me frustrated with what amounts to another arbitrary set of keystrokes. (I've always been a cross platform person so I was also juggling keystrokes for other operating systems and applications.) A colleague (hi Jules) introduced several of us to XEmacs around 1995. It had a gui, and colour, and most importantly a menu system. It was no longer necessary to memorize a large set of new keystrokes, as the menus showed them. You could do everything without knowing any, and then pick up those you use often enough.

By the mid 2000s XEmacs was languishing, and Emacs was slowly catching up with the gui. More and more packages only worked with regular Emacs (there were small but growing incompatibilities). I eventually made the switch from XEmacs to regular Emacs.

There was an explosion in different file types I was editing: Python, C, Javascript, Java, Objective-C, HTML, HTML with Jinja Templates, JSON, matlab, CSS, build scripts, SQL, and many more I have forgotten. Emacs had support for most. Support means syntax highlighting, indenting, jumping around notable symbols etc. More packages were produced that did linting (looking for common errors), and various other useful productivity enhancements.

At the same time a new editor Sublime Text was introduced. It had fantastic new interaction (goto anything, projects, command palettes, multiple selections, distraction free) and a rich package system (written in Python - yay!) I kept trying it, but kept finding issues that affected me. Development also seemed to drastically slow, and since it was closed source there was no way for others to improve and update the core.

Meanwhile Emacs became more and more frustrating. The web (HTML, Javascript, CSS) is not a first class citizen. Not many packages were distributed with the core, and you had to copy crytic elisp code from various places, or use strange tools to try and get them installed and kept up to date. Then you had to do that on each machine. Heck the package repositories (eg MELPA) didn't even use SSL by default! My emacs configuration file kept getting longer and longer.

Ultimately tools these days are defined by their vibrant community, useful defaults, and easy to use extension mechanisms. Emacs has all those, especially in the past. But they are of a different era and different cadence.

I have switched to Atom. It had a rough initial exposure with performance problems, and the extremely dubious choice of being closed source. However both have been addressed. Just days before Atom 1.2 was released, I removed Emacs in favour of Atom 1.1. My configuration file is 10 lines long, and I get the same experience on every machine.

Category: misc – Tags: exit review

Roger Binns — Thu 30 July 2015

I am one of the many many people getting the completely useless response on trying to upgrade to Windows 10.

Closing setup and trying again doesn't work. Nor did changing my language settings, .Net repair tools, freeing up huge amounts of space, rebooting, examining log files, or reading tea leaves.

A lesson I learned many years ago is that developers should work in support [1] (eg 3 weeks a year). Normally their experience of support issues is after they have been filtered through many layers of other people, and they don't see the ones that have been resolved even if fairly frequent. Essentially developers do not experience the friction that their customers or support staff regularly encounter.

I've done the support work myself, as well as seeing other developers doing it. There are immediate fixes such as tweaks to tools, asking for information in a different order, or new ideas for how to address common issues (hopefully eliminating them). Then they will go back and fix unhelpful messages in the product. For example a message like "couldn't find file" will be changed to say which file, and possibly detect if it is because the file doesn't exist or the directory containing it. Or make the code create a default file and parent directories.

From that point on, the developers produce substantially better diagnostics. They work out what information they would need on answering a support call and make the diagnostics provide it all. But as time passes, the memories fade, and shortcuts are taken. That is why working in support should be done regularly.

The Microsoft developers responsible for the screenshot "something happened" are likely a lost cause though.

As a side rant, Linux distributions are also distributed as ISO files. They can be used as is on optical media, network booted, dumped as is onto USB flash drives, and work on BIOS and EFI systems (even Apple's non-standard EFI). The Windows ISO is considerably more painful, especially if your machine doesn't have an optical drive, like pretty much all of them these days.

Category: misc – Tags: rants

Roger Binns — Tue 19 May 2015

Fundamentals

I recently decided to get a multipurpose device. They can do all this:

• Large battery to recharge other devices over USB (eg your phone and tablet)

• Provide wifi access to a network in front of it

  A wifi network is provided behind the device with a name and password of your choosing. You connect one or more of your devices to that.

  In front of it you can have no network at all, a wifi network (unrelated to the one behind), or a wired ethernet network. You do have to configure access to the network, but only for this device. Your devices are behind it blissfully ignorant of the real network.

• Exports attached storage (eg USB stick, USB hard drive, sdcard) via both SMB (aka "Windows network file sharing" supported by virtually everything these days) and DLNA (a multimedia network protocol, supported by many although the Apple ecosystem prefers "iTunes")

  On Android and desktop systems, you'll find that Kodi works for both SMB and DLNA, as does Android ES File Explorer (SMB only).

• They are cheap ($40 - $60 depending on battery capacity)

• Can run completely off the battery so no additional power is needed. They will run for many hours. They will also run while being charged.

• Similar in size to a pack of cards

• They use popular standards - eg they charge using standard micro-USB, provide power for devices with standard USB port, use existing filesystems, standard protocols etc. There is no need to carry different cables or chargers, and any software speaking SMB or DLNA works.

After some agonizing over Amazon reviews, and reading the manuals, I ended up with two.

The left red one is a HT-TM05 TripMate Versatile Wireless N Travel Router (Amazon page) although the packaging and internal names say Tripmate Sith. The right white one is a RAVPower RP-WD02 Wireless Filehub / Portable Travel Router (Amazon page). They are sold by the same company, and the underlying products are substantially similar except for the hardware layout.

How they do all this turns out to be quite simple. The battery provides power, and there is a small Linux based computer attached. It is running a MIPS based processor (the manuals even tell you the exact manufacturer and model number), 32MB of RAM, and 8MB of builtin storage for their software. For some reason MIPS cores seem very popular in network access devices - if you have a box at home from the likes of Linksys, DLink, Netgear etc, it is almost certainly using MIPS.

$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.36 (gcc version 3.4.2) #8 Fri Jul 11 10:44:45 CST 2014
$ /usr/sbin/smbd --version
Version 3.0.24

$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.21 (gcc version 3.4.2) #5 Fri Nov 1 13:36:46 CST 2013
$ /usr/sbin/smbd --version
Version 3.0.24

3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under
   Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1
   and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

   a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source
      code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2
      above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

   b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to
      give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically
      performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the
      corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections
      1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

   c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to
      distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only
      for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in
      object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with
      Subsection b above.)

- Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
  notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in
  the documentation and/or other materials provided with the
  distribution.

Category: misc – Tags: review

Roger Binns — Mon 21 July 2014

The US penal system is despicable in many different ways. John Oliver covers some of it.

Category: misc – Tags: reality

Roger Binns — Sat 19 July 2014

When people find out that you pay for incoming cell phone calls in the US, it seems illogical and likely part of the various issues where the country is dysfunctional (eg politics, health care, rampant hypocrisy). However there are good reasons for this system and issues in your own country you may not be aware of.

Whenever a phone call is made there are termination rates - the amount paid to the operator on the receiving end [1]. In most countries the termination rates for cell phone calls are higher than for landlines (note the termination rate covers where the call ends up - it isn't related to where the call is from - cell, landline or other).

This means that when a call goes to a cell phone, it costs more than going to a landline. Somebody ends up paying that difference.

Screenshot from a random calling card site. Note that these costs include the costs to route the call to the country, in addition to the landline or cellular termination. ie the termination fees have an even larger disparity than shown here.

Look at the United Kingdom or France where the cellular rates are considerably higher than landline rates [2]. Most countries decided make the caller pay for these higher rates, but the caller had to know they were doing that. Consequently they had to allocate new area codes for cellular (these are the UK ones). Every person making a call has to know which codes are which, and some knowledge of the different rates [3]. Receiving parties can't port non-cellular numbers. Cellular carriers have no incentive to reduce their rates.

In the US the difference between landline and cellular is paid by the receiving party. The North American Numbering Plan means area codes can't change from 3 digits without massive disruption, and that there aren't enough spare area codes even if they wanted to assign them to cellular (eg 36 area codes would be needed to get one number for every American and Canadian, and have some pattern to recognise the codes).

So is the US system better? It has a number of advantages:

• People don't have to remember even more rules about area codes and differing charges
• There is greater incentive to reduce the cellular extra prices since you are affected by every minute of incoming and outgoing calls. With the model used in other countries, the termination rate is set by the receiving customer's carrier and that customer has far less visibility or bargaining power over the rate.
• Cellular was easily rolled out without disruption. An existing number could switch to cellular and no one else would have to know or care. If you were a business (eg a plumber) you didn't have to worry about people calling you fretting over getting charged more for the call than your competitors.
• Numbers are easily portable. You can switch any number to use cellular. Countries using the other scheme can have portability but usually it is limited to cellular area codes only.
• The method used to connect the number with the recipient is only a concern of the recipient.

The US system does make sense, and does have a number of advantages. Someone is always paying for the difference between landline and cellular virtually everywhere.

The US carriers also charge for incoming SMS. This is more a case of being able to get away with it, mixed with some of the reasons above. However most plans these days are for unlimited voice and SMS, with the big charges for data consumption.

Category: misc

Roger Binns — Sun 25 May 2014

Last week Mario Kart Wii online services went away. I am a fan of driving games and have had Mario Kart Wii since it came out in 2008. Most driving games only allow for perfection. If you take a corner badly or have a crash, then that is it. You'll have lost several seconds and have to start again for the position or time [1].

Mario Kart is very forgiving, using goodie boxes scattered throughout the tracks, containing random items. The closer to the front you are the more pointless the goodies are, while being further back gives the good stuff especially items that let you get closer to the front.

That all leads to a nice balance. Mistakes that lose position get you better goodies that let you recover. Players who aren't as good drivers also get opportunities to move up. You get three laps of hectic racing with everyone having a reasonable chance of a good scoring position. And the best driver can come last too.

The single player game, racing against the computer is ok but not that much fun. You need to complete various cups to unlock vehicles and characters. It just isn't that hard nor does the computer offer much challenge.

Online on the other hand is spectacular fun. You race against other people. Unlike the computer they do all sorts of unexpected things as well as cool tactics. This makes every race unpredictable and lets you use your own nefarious tactics. Fortunately Nintendo means there is no interaction with other players unlike the swearing, racism and misogyny reported on other platforms. Heck you can't actually tell it is even people other than they don't behave like the computer does. When playing you'll assign all sorts of motives to actions, be lenient or get revenge.

The engineering is impressive too. The players can be all over the world (and often are) which means it takes a while for position and speed information to be transmitted to all other players. Until later correct information arrives it has to predict where karts are to show you them right now. This is why you can sometimes think you hit or shelled someone but then nothing happens.

Online is what makes this game.

The Wii doesn't do code storage or online code updates, so Nintendo's developers had to get everything right first time for the CD. (By contrast Gran Turismo 6 for PS3 had updates every few days after release.)

There are two areas that Nintendo didn't get right. The first is balance - you expect characters and vehicles to be approximately equal. There are different attributes - eg one vehicle may have a higher speed, but lower acceleration or vice versa. These can still be balanced. Sadly they gave the bikes too much advantage, with the consequence being virtually all highest scoring players using a big player (eg Donkey Kong) on a bike.

The second area is the waiting. Each race is a multi-step process waiting to join a race, waiting for everyone else to join, selecting a track, waiting for everyone else to track select, waiting for the system to pick the track, waiting for everyone to load the track and then finally you get to race. A lot of this waiting could be combined to make the whole process be quicker.

Sadly near the end the distasteful topic of cheats came up. Some people reverse engineered what was going on and could for example shell every player as the race started, or avoid having anything affect them. Despite these "impossible" things happening, Nintendo never seemed to do anything about it.

So what is next? Wii U has a new Mario Kart coming out, but it isn't that good. And it costs over $300 because you have to buy a relatively unpopular system. I'm going to pass, and just remember the several years of multiplayer Mario Kart Wii for the fun it was.

Category: misc – Tags: exit review

Roger Binns — Thu 08 May 2014

In the spirit of Bunnie's exit reviews I'm writing about a bag.

In 2005 I happened to be passing the Moscone Center where lots of events happen, and spotted many people on the street with the bag. It turned out Novell's Brainshare conference was happening inside and that was amongst the swag being given out. The bag looked the perfect size to me and one was ordered online. In the almost decade since, that bag has been with me all over the world for both personal and professional trips and meetings, and has been perfect.

Size

It is hard to get size exactly right. I wanted something big enough to function as a carry on (eg some clothes, toiletries, books, electronics and laptop) but at the same time being small enough that it easily fits in overhead bins, cars, and with me when I am walking. This bag makes the tradeoffs and gets the size exactly right.

When other passengers have been made to weigh or measure their carryon, I've always been bypassed with the bag.

For my last two laptops I specifically made sure they fit in the bag (just). They were the Lenovo Thinkpad T61 (15 inch) and T430s (14 inch).

Wheels and extension handle

It has wheels at the front and a nice long extension handle. The handle has two vertical pieces which makes it very stable and easy to control.

Straps, grab handle

There is another decent sized grab handle on top, useful for pulling out of overhead bins or just moving the thing around. There are also two backpack style shoulder straps at the front, hidden behind a panel. Although I never remember using them - it was always wheels or grab handle.

Plastic bucket

You can't see this in the picture but the entire bottom is a large plastic bucket with the fabric over it. It is about 15cm deep. This means that if it ever ended up in water, the water would have to be quite deep to actually get into the bag itself. It is nice to be puddle proof.

Compartments

There are 3 compartments - not too many and not too few. At the back (closest to the camera) is a small compartment suitable for keys, documents, pens etc. There is a nice organizer inside for all these including a zipped pocket and quite a bit of space at the bottom where I would have things like spare contact lenses and an alarm clock.

The middle compartment is for laptops and has a nice padded pouch plus enough additional space for things like mice and power bricks.

The main compartment is suitably spacious. Even when full it kept its shape which meant you could still easily get the laptop in and out.

Side pockets

You can see one suitable for water bottles or rolled up magazines. It has a drawstring with a clamp to keep whatever is there from falling out. The other side has zipped pocket - perfect for ear plugs and eye masks.

Understated but sufficient colour

The black colour means it doesn't draw attention to itself, but the red trim and panel at the front made it sufficiently noticable that it would get lost in a sea of other black bags or get forgotten in a meeting room.

Sadly it broke earlier this year with the plastic near the extension handle folding over. This causes the main compartment to distort which then does the same to the laptop compartment rendering the whole thing broken (or at least significantly reduced capacity.)

It was the exercise of trying to get a replacement bag that made me appreciate just how perfect this one is. Sadly Novell don't sell the bag anymore, nor could I track down who actually made it.

During my shopping trips to get a replacement I found problems like:

• Not having wheels
• Too large or too small
• Mismatched dimensions (eg really tall but comical lack of depth)
• Nowhere to put a laptop
• Designed to only take small Apple laptops (eg 11 inches)
• Not having easily accessibly external pocket/compartment for travel docs and similar
• No side pockets
• Very inconvenient to take laptop in and out
• Tendency to fall over
• General lack of attention to detail

So far the JWorld Sundance (model RBS-19) has been the least worst replacement, and took a really long time to find.

Category: misc – Tags: exit review

Roger Binns — Sun 20 April 2014

An app I have been using for several years is Glympse. It is very close to perfection.

It lets people know where you are. A common example is if you are meeting someone somewhere they can monitor your progress and estimated time of arrival. This is especially useful while driving.

Where Glympse gets things right is how smooth they make it. Unlike most other apps, absolutely no authentication, account creation, social media profiles or privacy invasion is required. That applies to both the sender and the recipients. Glympses automatically timeout (your choice of up to 4 hours, or on reaching your destination).

The Glympses themselves are a URL in the form glympse.com/123A-BCD4 which is sent to the recipients. Providing they can access the web, they can see details. You are tracked on a moving map, along with updated ETA, speed (if you chose to share it), traffic and track. Recipients on mobile devices can use the Glympse mobile app to track multiple people at once etc, but this is not required.

Gympses can be sent in whatever methods you have made available. For example SMS can be used on mobile, Twitter if you logged in, email etc - all at once.

The pervasive feeling throughout is an app on your side. Every potential source of friction has been removed, for both senders and recipients. You don't feel like a pawn in some ecosystem or social network war. This stuff just works, and works well. Recommended.

Category: misc – Tags: recommendation