Blackcap Blog

Published at 16:55 on 30 May 2019

It’s 17:00 on a Thursday a full ten days from when I interviewed for a job, and not a peep out of them, despite my sending a followup message. So you know what that means: they’re pursuing someone else but haven’t quite finalized things yet. But rest assured the odds are so insignificant they can safely be disregarded: at this stage, I have about as much chance as being hit by a stray meteor.

It’s not really a surprise or anything, but it is annoying, given how good a match the job in question was for my skills, and how well I solved one of the programming problems on the whiteboard. But there’s only so much you can do when not having any gray in your hair is one of the prime qualifications for the job.

And I’m certain the experience is equally frustrating for anyone who’s female, or who’s not White or Asian.  Just keep this all in mind the next time you hear some stuffed shirt from the technology sector whining about a lack of qualified talent.

Published at 07:40 on 21 May 2019

Her refusal to appear on Fox News has demonstrated that her lapse of judgement in letting Trump troll her on the Pocahantas issue is not a one-off.

Facts do not care about your feelings, Ms. Warren. Like it or not (and, like most on the left, I most assuredly do not), Fox News is the No. 1 most-watched news channel in the USA.

Only a fool too incompetent to campaign properly would turn down a chance to market her platform to an audience that size. Especially when you consider the not-insignificant number of voters who voted for Obama twice (and/or for Sanders once in the primary), and decided to either sit the 2016 general election out or vote for Trump. There are, in short, persuadable viewers on Fox News; Ms. Warren decided to write them off.

This is not a center versus left thing, either. Both Sanders and Buttigieg got it, and decided to accept Fox News’ invitations despite their personal dislikes of that network’s overall politics.

It is also not purely campaign realpolitik. If Warren’s gut reactions get the best of her when it comes to Trump’s trolling or Fox News’ editorial record, odds are gut reactions will get the best of her as president when she has to quickly respond to crises. That’s the last thing we need.

Buh-bye, Schoolmarm.

Published at 11:37 on 17 May 2019

So, I recently modified two existing software tools a bit and connected them together with a shell script to make a tool to extract individual TrueType fonts (.TTF files) from a TrueType font collection (.TTC file).

And the Property Rights Über Alles crowd immediately took offense, because this is a tool for “piracy.” Purportedly, simply because I am extracting files from what amounts to an archive I am creating an unauthorized derivative work, in violation of the copyright on the fonts.

I say bullshit. The fonts were in TrueType format before my extractor operates on them, and they are in TrueType format after it does. All that changes is what was a single file becomes multiple individual files. That’s it.

Really, now: If this “violates” the “terms of the license,” then you can’t even install software (including fonts) legally in the first place. Because how do installers work? By extracting files from archives, that’s how!

On top of that, just how are glyphs rendered? By reading the information in font files, copying it into memory, and doubtless in many cases normalizing it into a standard form in the case of software that supports multiple font file formats. That, too, is the dreaded and forbidden act of extraction. Worse yet, it is followed by the modification of the extracted data, producing an unauthorized derivative work (according to the property rights über alles crowd)!

It gets worse: the internal coordinate system in font files has nothing to do with the coordinate system on a screen or a printed page. Multiple scaling (multiplication) and offset (addition) steps must be performed in order to render text at the desired size and place. And if you print the text, or render it into a PDF, yet more transformations are performed on that raw data. And I haven’t even gotten into all the transformations that must happen if you send your text to a printer.

The biggest difference really is, the files from my extractor linger indefinitely on the filesystem, instead of being fleeting data in main memory somewhere. Even that’s not completely unique to my case, however: PDF documents contain stored fonts in a persistent and transformed form.

PDF documents must contain font data, in order to serve their intended purpose of being “softcopy hardcopy” that remains true to their intended format everywhere they go. If they didn’t have embedded fonts, they would fail in this purpose on any computer that didn’t have the needed fonts present. The fonts in PDF documents are transformed both to save on space, and to limit the utility of the embedded fonts for piracy.

As in the case of PDF documents, my extracted font files shouldn’t matter, and I doubt it does. Unless I distribute the extracted fonts (and I don’t plan to), they are private, internal data used by a few applications on my computer, nothing more.

That so many people are apparently incapable of seeing this just points to how divorced from reality the status quo has gotten when it comes to property rights.

Published at 10:56 on 12 May 2019

About a year ago, I made a post which claimed that many of the voters labeled “moderates” do not in fact have any strong ideological commitment to moderation or any other political principle. They are what I labeled nonideological pragmatists, willing to entertain ideas from across the political spectrum, provided they are presented in a convincing way.

Today, I ran across a Twitter thread by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez which anecdotally illustrates this point.

Published at 09:53 on 10 May 2019

There’s basically two kinds of plants you can grow: annuals and perennials.

Annuals come up fast but require a lot of tending during the growing season. But the growing season is also the outdoor recreation season, and I’d much rather be communing with native plants someplace wild than stuck at home trying to repeatedly assert control over a tiny plot of urban land. Yard work sucks.

Perennials are not nearly so high-maintenance, but they are slow to settle in. I, by contrast, just don’t settle in. It’s never happened in my life, and given that I’m well into my fifties, that means the odds are it’s never going to happen.

I tried to settle in to the home I am sitting in right now, but it didn’t work: I had overlooked how ageist and cultish the high tech world would become, and how much this would adversely impact my employabality in it. And if I can’t have a high-paying, high-tech job, it’s very hard to justify the expense of living in a region as costly as the Seattle metro area.

So this year I’m leaving. The year my native cacti in the window boxes are finally going to put on a huge bloom. The year my thimbleberries (after years of getting settled in) have flower buds on them. The year the dewberries finally flowered (female flowers, we’ll see if there’s a nearby male and I get fruit). The serviceberry is still a little thing, a decade or more from looking settled in.

Someone else is going to enjoy the results of the work I did. Not me. Or, someone else won’t appreciate all those “weird plants” that are not the ornamentals everyone else grows, rip them out, and replace them. Either way, I am going to get little benefit for the work I did.

It would be nice if my life were more compatible with gardening, but it’s just not.

Published at 19:35 on 8 May 2019

Some my find this title surprising. Alder trees have flowers?

To a botanist, a flower is anything that produces seeds and fruit (in the case of plants like alders with separate male and female flowers, the pollen-producing flowers also count, of course). There is no requirement that they be showy.

Yes, alder trees bear fruit as well as flowers! To a botanist, a fruit is anything that surrounds a seed. It doesn’t have to be fleshy, juicy, or edible. The tiny, dry wings that surround alder seeds are as much a fruit an apple or an orange.

The photograph above shows clusters of both male (large, dangling catkins) and female (the smaller, erect catkins at top) flowers. Those male catkins released clouds of yellow pollen when I gently brushed them.

The alder pictured above was not taken on Bainbridge Island and is not the Red Alder (Alnus rubra) so common on the Island. It is a Sitka Alder (Alnus viridis ssp. sinuata). I took that photo in the Olympic Mountains.

The Sitka Alder is much smaller than the Red Alder, typically being only a large shrub or small tree, making it far easier to find flowers in easy shooting range. Sitka Alders have glossier leaves, which are sharper-toothed than the Red Alder’s. The Sitka Alder’s leaves are not curled under slightly at their edges like the Red Alder’s are. The Sitka Alder is mostly a mountain tree, while the Red Alder is a common lowland species. One of the favored habitats of the Sitka Alder is avalanche slides; for this reason it is sometimes called the Slide Alder.

If all that leaves you a little confused, fear not! That particular Sitka Alder happened to be growing in the altitude range where the two species overlap, right next to a Red Alder sapling. I snapped a picture showing the two side by side (Sitka on the left, Red on the right).

 

Published at 15:45 on 6 May 2019

In the least surprising news development since the Sun rose at the forecast time this morning, it turns out that Alexa and Siri are, in fact, home eavesdropping devices.

George Orwell was an optimist. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, everyone had a telescreen in their home because the government forced them to. In today’s USA, people agree to it because advertisers have convinced them it’s personally convenient.

Published at 13:01 on 1 May 2019

The wild cherries on the Island are finishing their annual spring bloom. We have two kinds.

Our most common wild cherry is the Mazzard Cherry, Prunus avium. It was introduced from Europe, and is basically the wild ancestor of the cultivated Bing cherry. Our situation is actually the reverse of this, however; the ancestors of our wild Mazzard Cherries were introduced as cultivated cherries, and began growing in our woods when birds ate those cherries and scattered their seeds.

The large fruit and smaller tree size of cultivated cherries are recessive characteristics, so their progeny quickly reverted to the dominant wild form for the species. Although smaller and not quite so sweet as Bing Cherries, the Mazzard Cherry’s fruit is completely edible. The trick is finding any that are within easy picking reach; the usual large size of this tree means most of its fruit is accessible only by birds.

 

The native Bitter Cherry, Prunus emarginata, is also found growing wild here. While not quite so common as its introduced cousin, there is still no shortage of them on the island. It is well-named; as author Arthur Lee Jacobson notes, its fruit is “bitter enough to make one grimace in agony.”

It turns out that birds have a very different sense of taste than mammals do, and happen to find this cherry’s fruit completely palatable. It is thus likely that their bitter flavor evolved as a way to discourage consumption by mammals. Birds, being able to fly, are likely to do a better job of spreading seeds widely than mammals are.

In addition to having fruit that is basically inedible to humans, the Bitter Cherry is in all respects (size of overall tree, leaves, fruit, and flowers) smaller than the Mazzard Cherry. The Bitter Cherry’s flowers tend to open a week or two later, right as the Mazzard Cherry is finishing its bloom.

The Bitter Cherry also tends to have a trunk and branches that are slender for a tree of its size (the Mazzard Cherry’s appearance is much stouter). The Mazzard Cherry is the showier of the two when in bloom, thanks to its larger flowers.