Musings of an anarchist misfit
Published at 10:06 on 15 June 2012
I’m having to learn it for work purposes, and have already studied the language enough to be able to offer the following brief executive summary:
Ruby is a merger of an elegant, Scheme-like language which offers functional programming and metaprogramming with an ugly Perl-like syntax and design philosophy.
Published at 15:16 on 20 May 2012
If you’re in the market for a DOCSIS 2.0 cable modem, I suggest you avoid the Motorola SBG901. Based on my experience, they’re pieces of unreliable junk.
I’ve now tried two, and they both exhibit the same symptom of continually rebooting themselves (causing a lost connection) every few minutes. The modem I’m presently renting from my broadband provider, the Ambit U10C018, almost never does this, so it’s not an issue of my signal from the cable company being weak or unreliable.
Given that two completely different samples have behaved in the same way, I would also have to say that the odds of this being two random defects are pretty low. It appears to be a design defect of this product. A Google search on “motorola sbg901 keeps rebooting” comes up with more than a few matches of others who have run into my problem, which provides further evidence of a design defect.
It’s a pity, as the Motorola product has the desirable feature of combining a wireless access point with a cable modem in one box.
Published at 00:13 on 7 April 2012
Having just received one as a generous and unexpected gift (witness previous entry), I’m trying to puzzle that out for myself.
It’s significantly bulkier and heavier than my Slingshot Organizer or the scraps of paper I write shopping lists on, so I cannot see it replacing either.
It’s also significantly heavier than my paper journal book, though it ties it in bulk. However, typing on a “keyboard” that appears on a touch screen is every bit as slow and error-prone as it always seemed to me it would be, so it’s of limited utility as a journal-entering device. A keyboard would rectify this (and they are available), but then the result would be both heavier and bulkier than what it replaces.
It’s also much heavier and bulkier than my MP3 player, and it’s an awkward form factor to use as a camera.
That leaves a device suited primarily to the consumption of information in digital form, be it in the form of Web pages or e-books, one which can be pressed into service for entering text if that need should arise. It is definitely less heavy and bulky than the alternative of a laptop computer.
If you purchase an adapter, it also possible to download images from a digital camera into an iPad. The same advantages of less weight and bulk (compared to a laptop) apply in this case, too.
So, it’s a nice gift that will at times come in handy, but I also don’t expect to be carrying it with me routinely; the things it does better than the existing alternatives tend not to be things I do all that frequently away from home.
Published at 14:50 on 6 April 2012
Test of creating a post from new iPad. Well, this confirms what I’ve always thought about touchscreen “keyboards”: they won’t ever put mechanical ones out of business.
Published at 12:08 on 3 February 2012
Just what is that fourth character, anyhow? A lower-case letter O that’s been stretched and distorted to the size of an upper-case one? An upper-case letter O? The numeral zero?
There’s no way to tell, of course, save to take a wild guess. A guess where you have 67% odds of guessing wrong (yes, it’s case-sensitive, so “O” is not recognized as “o”). And if you guess wrong, guess what? That’s right: you get presented with brand new CAPTCHA! Which, given the number of characters in it, odds say will probably contain at least one “C”, “c”, “O”, “o”, “P”, “p”, “V”, “v”, “W”, “w”, “X”, “x”, “Z”, “z”, or “0” character.
Charming. Simply charming.
Published at 21:43 on 28 January 2012
Really, what’s the point?
It’s not as if having a cable on my keyboard limits its usefulness in any way. Maybe the cable on my mouse does — a little. Most of the time, though, I’m completely unaware of it, too. It’s only a thin cable, not a ship’s anchor chain or anything.
Meanwhile, having a wired connection to the CPU means both keyboard and mouse have electric power whenever my computer does. Wireless devices must perforce depend on batteries. Batteries that can (and do) go dead. Batteries which Murphy’s Law states will go dead at the most inconvenient times imaginable. Such as late at night when you’re out of batteries an important project is due next morning. Plus the cable keeps the mouse conveniently tethered to my computer, so I can’t inadvertently take it elsewhere and lose it.
So to sum up: for keyboards and mice, Bluetooth offers little or no real advantage while imposing a very real disadvantage. I suppose there’s the odd specialized application where wires are a very real disadvantage, to the point where it’s worth putting up with the disadvantages of wireless technology for such devices. But that does nothing to explain how common wireless keyboards and mice are; it seemed that wireless mice outnumbered wired ones at Fry’s.
Which begs the question: why do so many people purchase and use such obviously inferior products? The only answer I can come up with is one of technology for technology’s sake: simply because we can use wireless keyboards and mice, many people apparently think that we should.
Though I must confess this rush to embrace a new technology for mice still strikes me as extremely odd, given how long those horrible trackball mice (perpetually getting dirty and needing cleaning) lingered on the market in the face of far superior optical mouse technology. Even the old-fashioned optical mice that required a special mouse pad still beat trackball mice (which tracked so poorly that virtually everyone bought a pad for them, anyhow) hands down. And even after the pad-free optical mice appeared on the scene, it still took nearly a decade for trackball mice to finally end up in the dustbin of history where they belong.
Published at 20:50 on 28 January 2012
Really, it’s amazing how crappy computer keyboards generally are. I was just at Fry’s getting the capacitor I’m going to try replacing, and had a chance to try out their keyboard selection.
The dominant “rubber dome” technology provides absolutely horrible tactile feedback: the electrical action takes place after the main mechanical action that one feels. Therefore, the only recourse if you want to type quickly is to bang on the keyboard like crazy, to ensure each key stroke hits home and causes a character to be entered. This causes fingers to get much more tired than they need to, because one is exerting on average far more force than one needs.
The only keyboard technologies that provided proper tactile feedback were ones made using IBM’s “buckling spring” technology (which I think is the best), and some mechanical keyswitches (which can get pretty darn good, too). Every subsequent technology has had no advantages for the user whatsoever: the only advantages newer keyboard technologies have has been for the manufacturer’s drive to cut costs.
What astounds me is not that the cheapest keyboards feel like crap (one would expect that, you’re getting pure “dollar engineering”), but how many keyboards with $100-and-up price tags (even ones advertised as “ergonomic”) also felt like complete crap when I tried them. Making a fancy curving layout so one’s hands can be held at a natural angle but using a technology that forces (at the cost of failing to enter the random character) users to use unnecessary force is like having a restaurant that serves a turd as dessert, but frosts it elegantly in icing and serves it on a sterling plate.
The only keyboards that weren’t absolute crap were two models by Razer geared towards the gamer crowd. While spendy, they were still less expensive than many of the crappy ones.
Published at 12:57 on 28 January 2012
My expensive Unicomp keyboard has been acting up as of recently. For a few hours this afternoon I thought I had fixed it simply by reseating a loose connector inside the keyboard itself. Now it’s acting up again.
I’m going to try replacing the one electrolytic capacitor in the thing, even though it looks OK, just on the off chance it is infested with capacitor plague. But at this stage I’m decidedly pessimistic about its prognosis. Everything else on the thing is a surface-mount component, and the most likely culprit is the single proprietary IC on the logic board.
Meaning that it’s probably replacement time.
Update: Yup, definitely replacement time. Just tried replacing the capacitor, and the quirky behavior remains.
Published at 16:54 on 5 January 2012
(For the non-geeks, Cocoa is the user interface library on the Macintosh. It’s what lets you write programs that use the familiar windows, menus, alerts, and whatnot that a typical Mac program has.)
Part of it is learning a new language (and not precisely a nice, clean one: Objective-C is almost as crufty as C++), part of it is that the innards of the Mac just seem counterintuitive to me.
On the former issue, there are actually alternatives to Objective-C, including as of recently C#, a language which is far more modern and easy to use. Unfortunately, most of those are open-source projects as opposed to things with Apple’s explicit sanction and blessing, and as I’ve said before, shoddy documentation is the Achilles’ heel of open-source software.
Which raises the latter issue: the documentation and design of Xcode seems to be based on an assumption that both Xcode and Cocoa are intuitive. It documentation keeps talking about how Xcode makes everything easy and logical. For me at least, it certainly is not.
However, slow as the process of fighting with Xcode is, at least Xcode and Objective-C are fairly comprehensively documented by Apple. I hate to think of how much more difficult trying to learn Cocoa in C# would be.
Published at 14:36 on 22 December 2011
… when reading a Craigslist job posting titled “PHP Programmer & Fine-Code Connoisseur // $110,000 (Seattle)”. PHP is a textbook example of the hazards of someone who has insufficiently studied language design designing a language. No genuine “fine-code connoisseur” would want to touch PHP with a 10-foot pole.
The unrealistic salary indicates that it’s a pretty transparent example of a sleazy recruiter trolling for résumés. PHP jobs tend to pay less than those using most other platforms, precisely because anyone with enough smarts to be a good programmer doesn’t want to touch the language.