Blackcap Blog

Published at 08:48 on 27 October 2026

Tried to contact them yesterday around 11:00 AM local time. Got the same chatbot. Same story “we are busy now, will contact you later.” Asked to be contacted by SMS.

Never was contacted by SMS. Around 7:00 PM, entering a theatre to see a movie with a friend, I notice a newly-arrived email from Oxio. Yes, another email, even though I requested SMS. It gives me an hour to respond. As I am walking into the auditorium for a movie that starts in a few minutes. Eff that.

Apparently Oxio thinks it is fair to require me to put my life on hold so I can cater to their needs, instead of them serving me for the money I pay them. Apparently they think it is fair to require me to respond within an hour after it taking them nine hours to respond to me.

Worst. Company. Ever. At least, the worst I have ever dealt with. And I’m an old guy, so I’ve dealt with a lot of businesses over the years.

Published at 17:35 on 26 October 2026

I have Telus internet service, which is rock-solid reliable but expensive and you have to call back every few years, threaten to leave, talk to retention, and get some crazy nonstandard temporary deal (that expires in a year or two) to get service that does not cost even more than the already expensive discounted special deal. Stupid and tiring. The idea of paying around $50/month for a straight deal was real tempting, so I decide to give it a whirl.

They ship me my equipment and I track its arrival. Eventually it arrives and I get the notice that my outlets should be live. So I plug the modem in and turn it on. Nothing. No signal at all. It goes through a power-up light show and eventually settles into a flashing green “no signal” state.

So I try the other cable outlet in the house. Same story. I have several 75-ohm coax patch cables, so I try a different cable. Same story. Different cable, other outlet, still dead. At that point I try to talk to support.

Except Oxio doesn’t have customer support people, so far as I have been able to tell. Just an AI chatbot. One of the worst chatbots I have seen, in fact. Slow, buggy, unreliable, keeps asking for the same information over and over.

Eventually it asks me if I’ve tried pushing the recessed reset button on my modem. I haven’t, so I try that. Fifteen minutes later I come back to realize that my chat session has expired due to being inactive for more than ten minutes. Have I mentioned yet that it takes 10 minutes minimum to reset a modem, because the instructions Oxio gives says to wait 10 minutes after pushing the reset button?

So I start a new chat session, this time via SMS. Easily the worst SMS chatbot I have ever used. About half of my SMS messages fail to get delivered. When they get delivered, it is super ultra slow to respond. Eventually I get a canned message saying they are real busy and will SMS me back. They never do.

Then the next day I notice a response from Oxio in my spam email inbox. They had responded by email, not SMS as promised. I respond to that message, and get the same g-d- chatbot that starts asking me the same basic information all over again (province, email address, full name, account number, etc.).

That’s it, I’ve seen enough. That was last Friday evening and I put returning my equipment and cancelling my service on today’s agenda: I have seen enough. I don’t want to deal with Oxio anymore. It is worth putting up with Telus to get service that actually materializes and humans I can actually talk to.

Except of course it’s the same g-d- chatbot. Which, of course, is “busy” and “will get back to me later.” Because of course. I am never allowed more than a 10 minute delay, but they feel entitled to hours of delay.

I can see where this ends up: a billing dispute. Because I am not going to pay Oxio one red cent more. Let them send me to collections and start calling me back. Oh, I’m going to try avoid getting to that stage, but I’m pretty sure it will get there anyhow, because talking to a real person and getting any issue resolved seems impossible. I’m also taking screenshots and a journal in case I have to take them to court.

Ugh. Worst mistake I have made in many years.

Published at 18:08 on 22 October 2026

This site was down for a few days. Yes, it was related to the recently-announced PHP2Shell vulnerabilities. No, no security incidents happened on this site that I am aware of. I preemptively took the site down until I could update PHP and remove the vulnerabilities.

What’s amusing is all the temper tantrums about PHP that this prompted. People were huffily announcing that PHP should be phased out post-haste. I get it: PHP is a pretty awfully-designed programming language. But, as I wrote a little over five years ago, it doesn’t matter: market-leading packages like WordPress are written in PHP, and if you want to run them, you have to run PHP.

And, in this case, I had to do a little coding in PHP, because stock WordPress didn’t quite do all I wanted out of the box. Because WordPress is so well designed, it was simple to extend. Because it is so well documented, it was easy to figure out how to do it. I am better off writing several dozen lines of code in PHP (code that I can just write, thanks to good documentation), than I am writing many hundreds of lines of code in some other, theoretically superior, programming language (code that takes lots of painful trial and error, thanks to lousy documentation).

But back to the temper tantrums. People were talking about uninstalling PHP and using packages written in some other programming language. Just ridiculously impractical for code that already mostly works as intended anyhow. Sure, there was a security hole in PHP. There have been security holes in all sorts of software systems, including the Linux kernel, yet you don’t hear the same people saying not to use Linux. PHP is one of the key technologies powering the Web today; as such, of course there was going to be a security patch promptly released to address the issue. As indeed there was. Problem solved, no painful, expensive rewrite needed.

I do work on programming projects as a hobby from time to time. This blog is not one of them; it is something I mostly want to just work. Thanks to WordPress, PHP lets me do that easier than any other alternative, so it is PHP that powers this site.

As such things often are. The decision of which programming language to use is almost never based solely on the capabilities and attributes of the core programming language. Instead, it typically comes down to the libraries and subsystems that programming language gives you access to.

Published at 09:45 on 12 June 2026

About two months ago, I started experimenting with scraping online job listings. The main motive was just to save myself frustration; I have long been disappointed with the quality of the search results from such boards. Why should I waste time wading through a bunch of crap I am, given my search specifications, self-evidently uninterested in?

The scraper gathers the texts of recent job listings from a variety of different online job boards into a data file. A separate postprocessing step then reads through that data file, doing some rudimentary natural language processing on the texts of the job listings therein. Basically, it does keyword searches, giving points for matches, and bonus points for combinations of matches I view as signs a job is likely to be particularly interesting. Then it sorts the listings by the resulting scores and presents them to me.

And indeed (pun unintended), it is not unusual for some jobs to end up with a score of zero. A complete goose egg. The only way this is possible is if none of the keywords I am searching for match.

Another thing my scraper does is filter out things it has seen before. I keep track of the primary keys the site uses to store the listings in their database, and when I last saw them. (These primary keys are easy enough to deduce, because they inevitably show up in the HTML link to each job details page.) Today Indeed proudly returned a job I had last seen in the middle of last month as its first result, despite my request to sort the results in descending chronological order.

Why do this? Why show listings that have nothing whatsoever to do with my search terms? Why show some old listings I saw a month ago to me again? Because money. Indeed is obviously charging its clients extra for these services, so their ads get better reach. It may be bad for job seekers like me, but it is good for their own bottom line. This is textbook enshittification, wherein market forces reward businesses for offering worse services.

Have I mentioned yet that a dozen or so years ago, you didn’t have to do anything backhanded to scrape jobs from Indeed? They had a public API whose purpose was to make it easy for a program to download and filter job listings. They got rid of that, of course, because it is contrary to a business model that now includes shoving old crap or irrelevant crap at users in return for money.

And it’s not just Indeed. It’s most of them. The only job board that seems completely immune from this trend, in fact, is Job Bank, which is a public service run by the Government of Canada. They offer a public API, too. Let capitalism fans and their mythology of private enterprise always offering superior products put that in their pipe and smoke it.

Published at 08:30 on 27 May 2026

After using Avalonia for one project, I can say that it is basically what I thought it was, with one exception.

My previous deadline for the wxPython web site coming back up to something approaching full health blew by, so Avalonia it was. As I knew going in, it’s a little more clumsy and boilerplate-y than I like. The resulting apps don’t look as slick and polished as native ones (because they don’t use native widgets). But it works well enough, and it’s popular enough I don’t have big worries about it turning into abandonware.

The exception was multithreading. Avalonia supports async/await, or as Microsoft calls it task-based asynchronous programming. Because of course it does. Async/await got its start with .NET languages. So it’s been part of C# for a long time, and that feature has been fully absorbed into frameworks developed for that programming environment.

This ends up making Avalonia a clear winner over Qt and its quirky signals and slots and its poorly-implemented memory management. It even makes it a clear winner over the callback-based multithreading that wxPython offers. Async/await effectively compiles under the hood to callbacks, but it lets the programmer write code much more as if it were traditional blocking code, which makes coding far easier.

Signals and slots were a significant step backwards over Swing’s callbacks. Async/await is a significant step forward. What seemed to be a narrow win now looks like a clear win.

The things that make Avalonia suck still suck. All GUI frameworks suck. Avalonia simply sucks less than the alternatives for my purposes, significantly less.

And yeah, I know: the wxPython web site now seems to be back up. Well, so what? It took most of a fortnight to come back to full health. That speaks loudly as to how little momentum there currently is behind that platform.

Published at 15:26 on 20 May 2026

So, anyhow, I settled on wxPython as my Python GUI framework of choice.

One would think that, given its generally superior programmer interface (it is not even close), wxWidgets and wxPython came after Qt and PySide. Surprisingly, the exact opposite is the case.

My explanation for the mystery is a mixture of groupthink and functionality. Having to continually think about memory management just comes with the territory in C++. So the Qt team, being C++ programmers, didn’t think much of it when designing their Python bindings. It’s all just a natural part of programming, right? Add to that how important smart phones have become, and how Qt supports those (but wxWidgets does not), and you have your answer right there.

Unfortunately, while wxPython is free from the worst braindamage that pervades PySide and PyQt, the package, despite being around for a while and despite having a fairly recent release, doesn’t seem to be very popular and may be on its way to becoming abandonware. What makes me suspect this is that late last Thursday, the wxPython web site started acting up, and as of my typing this is basically completely down. On top of that, I’ve run into a clear bug in the underlying wxWidgets code that has been sitting around unfixed since last February.

Maybe they’re just having a spot of rough luck, but my feeling is that a popular project with lots of active development would probably have a backup site going by now. If they manage to restore service by Friday afternoon, I will probably keep the faith (and even offer to contribute my own efforts), but things are on hold until then.

If it doesn’t come back up, it will probably be time to chalk up another win for .NET. Avalonia certainly has its issues, but they don’t seem to rise to a Qt level of obnoxiousness, and I don’t want to produce something that’s basically obsolete the instant I finish coding it.

Published at 13:18 on 14 May 2026

I had high hopes for PySide6, the dominant Python binding to the Qt framework. From what I had read, it was clearly the most popular way to do GUI programming in Python, well-supported by an active dev team, and a little checking up revealed this impression was accurate.

All went well until it came time to do some I/O-and-compute-intensive background work. For some reason, the Qt dev team didn’t stop at GUI development; they went on to develop a whole universe that encompasses more than just graphical user interfaces. As an example, instead of using standard Python thread pools, all documentation on worker threads in Qt focuses on using QThreadPool. I was hoping to find some explanation on why things are done this way, and why doing it the standard Python way was or was not a good idea, but I had no luck. Not willing to run risks, QThreadPool it was.

Thankfully, it wasn’t bad. It’s just a typical thread pool that one submits jobs too. The problem happened when my jobs were done and wanted to return some results for the UI thread to display.

In normal UI frameworks, that is simplicity itself. There is a call to submit code for execution in the front-end event loop, you submit a closure containing the result and how to process it, exit the background job, and you are done.

Qt is not normal. It has these quirky relics of the early/mid 90’s attempts to manage concurrency called signals and slots and it expects you to use them everywhere. That includes worker jobs that need to notify the UI event loop of something.

It turns out that signals and slots are seriously broken by design. They don’t work unless both sender and receiver objects remain active until the signal is received by the slot. Any departure from this requirement and things will randomly fail. Sometimes they fail visibly with an exception (often an oddball one out of left field that doesn’t directly signify the cause of the issue). Sometimes signals will just get silently dropped on the floor.

So, no problem, just keep the sender active. But I’m sending the signal to indicate that I am done! Why should I remain active? My work is done, it is time to exit. It is an onerous requirement, one that I don’t have to bother with in any other framework of which I am aware. In wxPython, Swing, and Avalonia, I just submit the code to do the front-end processing to the event loop and exit. In Qt, I have to wait around for the front end to message me back that it has received my results and I may now exit.

And signals themselves are bizarre and un-Pythonic. You create them by defining class variables of type Signal, but you never use them as such. Instead you create instances of that class and Qt does some backhanded, behind-the-scenes hackery to transmute those class variables into instance variables of type SignalInstance. Just one more sharp edge for the programmer to cut themselves on.

It gets worse. It turns out that this is but a particular instance of Qt in Python being for the most part a thin veneer over a library written in C++. There is little or no communication between how C++ manages memory and how Python manages it. Create a control, add it to a parent control, but don’t store it in a global variable or as an instance variable in a long-lived Python object, and Python might garbage-collect it even though Qt still has a C++ pointer to the same memory region. Qt programmers have to follow all sorts of arbitrary rules to avoid memory management issues.

Use Qt and you will be painfully aware of memory management all the time. This cuts to the prime reason I want to use a language like Python, which features automatic memory management, in the first place! Forcing this sort of experience onto the programmer is positively asinine.

This is not a minor nitpick, as it gets in the way of how I like to program. I like to be dynamic and reactive. Just create UI elements on the fly and display them. The logic that manages and displays them will (or, rather, should) hold references to them, keeping them from being garbage collected, until they get closed or removed. Then they vanish, in memory as well as on screen. The number of elements naturally expands and contracts according to the needs of the user. The only constraint is the amount of hardware memory, and possibly quotas on same imposed by the system. Larger systems with more memory can naturally be taken advantage of, as needed. Simple, logical, effective. And needlessly painful to accomplish in Qt.

And this seems to be an only-in-Qt thing. In wxPython, for example, the dev team thought about this, and explicitly coded their glue to the C++ world to avoid these issues. (It’s not very hard to do.)

Qt seems to be the answer to the question: “I want the worst of both worlds. Is there any way I can program in a language as slow as Python and still have the memory-management headaches of C++ to deal with?”

To hell with Qt.

Published at 09:49 on 13 May 2026

The suckiness that is the Java build environment finally got to me. That corrupt JAR file (the second time this has happened to me) was the final straw. I should not have to debug common build tools and the files they make. They should just work. The only bugs I should routinely battle with are the ones I just wrote in my own code. That is quite enough work, thank you very much.

So, despite Java in many ways being the best way to write a portable graphical application for the desktop, those JCA’s just are too much. The final straw had broken the camel’s back.

I had sort of been biased against Avalonia since learning that it focuses on pixel-for-pixel consistency between platforms (something I believe is a big mistake for desktop application programming). Then again, ASP.NET Core is so much better than any Python alternative web framework and Avalonia uses a similar code-behind model. Maybe the pixel-for-pixel compatibility doesn’t result in something that bad after all?

Executive summary: The rendering is better than I thought, but it doesn’t matter. There are enough other reasons not to use Avalonia.

File dialogs. In Swing (Java), Qt, and wxWidgets, one can customize these by adding extra controls. In Avalonia, you get the standard file dialog and that is it, no provision for customization. Want to ask for more parameters? Pop up a second dialog. The problem is, that is often a losing user experience; many load and save operations just naturally lend themselves to a need for a little extra information. Better to handle it all in one step, unless one is asking for a lot of extra information (and one usually is not).

File filters in dialogs. In Java and wxWidgets, you filter files by extension. In Qt, you filter by extension or MIME type. In Avalonia, you filter by extension on Windows and Linux. Linux also offers the option of filtering by MIME type. On the Mac, neither of the above work; you must filter on this wonky thing called an “Apple uniform identifier type.” Hello? The whole point of a cross-platform framework is to smooth this sort of stuff out! I shouldn’t have to deal with any weird Apple-specific stuff like this at all; it should just be MIME types and/or extensions everywhere. So stupid and annoying.

Data types in the clipboard. On most frameworks (Java Swing and AWT, Qt, wxWidgets) these are normalized from system-to-system. On Avalonia, the story is similar to file frameworks: one way for Linux and Windows, another way (those “Apple uniform identifier types” again) on Macs.

XAML. This is the declarative, layout-describing language that one codes behind. Unfortunately, unlike Razor templates in ASP.NET (which are powerful and have access to basically all C# control structures), XAML is pretty weak-sauce. It’s a garden-variety XML schema, with little or no provision for imperative coding. This is a pretty big problem, as cross-platform GUI programming often necessitates imperative coding. Consider pull-down menus; the Mac organizes them quite differently than do Windows or Linux. So a user-friendly app will include conditional logic and adapt itself accordingly. This is not exactly easy in XAML. You have to use some brand-new (and poorly-documented) features, some of which have some truly obnoxious misfeatures. The end result ends up being a lot more verbose and repetitive than it needs to be.

MVVM. Avalonia rams the model-view-view-model paradigm down your throat. It’s possible to resist this, but you have to work at it. MVVM was an effort to manage complexity in very large and complex programs. Not all programs are very large and complex (and fewer programs should be), so not all programs need MVVM. Even the inventor of MVVM openly admits this. Worse, the flavour of MVVM that Avalonia pushes is cartoonishly rigid, formulaic, and doctrinaire. Every view gets its own separate view model, even though it often makes more sense to share a view model amongst cooperating views. Even worse yet, by pushing something that makes sense for the largest programs, one pushes the mindset that computer programs should by default be large and complex. This mindset is positively harmful, as it leads to feature bloat.

The documentation. XAML is all standard controls classes under the hood, so one doesn’t have to use it. One can just use those controls classes directly, in C#. Then one gets the full suite of comprehensive imperative programming features C# has. Unfortunately, the documentation on how to do this is extremely incomplete. It’s mostly focused on how to do things in XAML. What documentation there is tends to be something of a mess. Complex classes, with many dozens of properties and methods, and nothing in alphabetical order. Why? Just why? There is simply no excuse for this lack of organization.

The choice of what programming language to use is often dictated by frameworks and libraries, and not the core features of the language itself. So it is here. Everything other than Avalonia in C# is generally worse than Avalonia. So C# simply doesn’t make sense for this project.

It is the exact converse of the situation with back-end Web programming. This time, it is Python that has clearly the best framework.

Why? Culture. Group identification. Avalonia was written by people that came out of the .NET world and wanted to make .NET applications more portable. It was strongly patterned after Windows frameworks like WPF. User-friendly GUI programs have never precisely been Microsoft’s strongest suit; Windows is rightly regarded as inferior to the Mac when it comes to user friendliness. It just turns out that that externally-visible awkwardness is there in no small part due to internal awkwardness bubbling up to the surface. And because the Windows universe is really big, most of those in it are astoundingly ignorant of what other universes have done.

When it came to Web servers, Microsoft had been left behind. They had to do a good job on ASP.NET, else nobody would switch over from the various open source frameworks that had already dominated the landscape. When it comes to the desktop, the exact opposite was the case. Complacency tends to produce inferior outcomes.

That said, I still might use Avalonia someday. If, that is, I ever have occasion to develop another smartphone app. I would want it to be portable, and the main alternatives to Avalonia for such things are Electron and Qt. The former is Javascript-based, and the way Javascript so badly botched modules and imports is reason enough to eschew the language. Qt is, well, Qt, and I will get into the specifics of that particular flavour of awfulness soon.

Published at 22:01 on 11 May 2026

I’ve been experimenting with them, because I have a need to rewrite a tool I use from Kotlin into some other programming language. Not because of any real defects in Kotlin (despite its proximity to the Java world and its associated JCA’s, this is not a show-stopper).

No, the problem is that I need to read HEIC files, and there is no good, easy way to do this in Kotlin, because there are simply no good, open-source, comprehensive, general-purpose imaging processing libraries available for the JVM. There are limited libraries that do not support HEIC nor the large size of the HEIC images I wish to read (such as the built-in stuff in the standard Java class library). There are esoteric libraries like ImageJ that support all sorts of oddball image formats used in the microscopy and health care fields, but not HEIC. There is no shortage of libraries that are abandonware and haven’t had an update in a decade or more.

By contrast, C# has Magick.NET and Python has Pillow, both of which do what I want. So I have been looking into GUI frameworks for those languages. Lets just say there are a lot of bad ones and leave it at that for now. I will post some details on the badness later (some of it is pretty mind-blowingly bad).

Suffice it to say that at this point I am reasonably sure wxPython will suit my needs, and it took a disgustingly long period of trial-and-error to get to that conclusion.

Published at 21:49 on 15 April 2026

It’s supposed to be really hard, and Cloudflare does indeed to a very good of detecting (and banning) web scrapers. But, it turns out that this is one of those things that, while indeed very difficult to do in the general case, is actually quite simple in a lot of specific cases.

The main trick is to use Playwright (with the playwright_stealth addon) to control a browser, and to use that browser to scrape the web. You could theoretically use some other browser automating tool like Selenium to do this, but the problem with Selenium is that it basically advertises itself with every request (and there is no way to turn this off), and that triggers Cloudflare in short order.

The second trick is to mimic a human user as faithfully as possible. Generally, that means going slow, i.e. no faster than a human would navigate a web page, and inserting randomness into the process so it looks like a human and not an automaton is controlling the browser. This is where things break down for abusive scrapers like AI companies; they can’t take it slow, because if they do, it will literally take millennia to get as much data as they want. But I am not an AI company, and only need to scrape a modest amount of data, so taking it slow is good enough (I just let it run, and the results get collected eventually, not as fast as they might otherwise have been, but it still beats manual cutting and pasting).

The reason I mention this is that, if you try searching on how to do this, the results tend to be pretty useless. They are dominated by either a) techniques that no longer work and which will trigger Cloudflare almost instantly, or b) commercial scraping services interested in taking your money. The latter may actually be a useful service if you want to scrape a lot, but I am not in that category.

That all of this is even necessary to write about is yet another data point in the overall enshittification of the Internet, which by my reckoning peaked in its usefulness circa 2010 and has been heading downhill ever since. The services I now have to use devious techniques to scrape used to be easily scrapable; actually, in many cases, they had free API’s designed to work well with another computer and didn’t need to be scraped at all.

And yes, the abusive scrapers are as much (or more) to blame here as are the sites removing functionality. I have had to implement anti-scraping measures on a site I host, because AI companies were ignoring robots.txt and scraping the daylights out of it. It was so bad that I was getting server crashes from the abuse.