Blackcap Blog

Published at 11:51 on 11 March 2015

This is all you need to know to be sure of the statement in the title above.

“Up to” is sales-speak for “no more than”. So the thing has a maximum up time of 18 hours, tops.

100 years ago, the standard “up time” for a mechanical pocket watch was 30 hours. And that’s a conservative 30 hours; many last more like 36. I know, I use a 100-year-old pocket watch. And when a mechanical watch runs down, it takes well under a minute to rewind it.

In contrast, the Apple Watch — which runs for about half as long as my pocket watch — doubtless takes hours to recharge. It has to. It runs on a rechargeable battery, and batteries don’t instantly recharge.

So the Apple Watch not only limited in its functionality, it’s unforgiving and domineering as well. It basically says: You will remember to charge me before you go to bed (and not at any other time), human, or I will punish you by refusing to work the next day. Obey my whim or suffer the consequences.

It is precisely such finicky design that makes me dislike so many applications of high technology. It’s a mystery to me how anyone can be so seduced by consumerism as to want such poorly-designed yet expensive crap in their lives.

Published at 20:18 on 18 February 2015

I wanted to create a track to follow for my GPS based on property lines which are part of the public record. A little searching revealed that most GIS software can do this these days.

Years ago, I supported an installation of the GRASS GIS at the University of Washington. It was notoriously difficult to install and configure. About three years ago, I played with installing GRASS on my home computer, and discovered that it’s approximately as difficult to learn to use as it is to install. A pity, as it is free and by all accounts very powerful.

So I did more searching to see if someone had come up with an easier-to-use open-source GIS. Indeed they had, and it’s called QGIS. Actually, that’s only about half-true; from what I’ve been able to gather, QGIS is mostly a user-friendly front-end for GRASS.

And user-friendly it is. In an evening, I managed to import a bunch of GIS data available for free from my county of residence and use the resulting GIS project to draw and export the desired track to my GPS. It took a fair amount of web searches and searching through the documentation, I never did figure out how to import the road and place labels, and the process of exporting the GPS track was more than a little bit fiddly.

But no matter. In an evening, I managed to do what I had set out to do. That’s far more than I ever accomplished trying to bend plain old GRASS to my will.

No doubt a professional-grade GIS like ArcGIS would likely have been even more smoothly designed and documented. No matter. Professional GIS software doubtless costs thousands of dollars, an expense that cannot be justified just to occasionally create a GPS track.

Having something affordable (better yet, free!) which is usable by mere mortals is a major win.

Published at 09:06 on 12 November 2014

For years I was on Apple Mail. It worked, and its UI was consistent with the rest of the system. I was happy, even though Apple always tinkered with it, and the tinkering inevitably resulted in a UI I liked less than the one before.

Then Apple Mail’s searches just stopped working for me. I tried cleaning out the index files, that fixed things for a while, then broken again, and this time rebuilding the index didn’t help.

So in desperation I cut over to Thunderbird. It wasn’t a cleanly Mac-like, but it did have a main display window more like the classic Apple Mail I knew and loved. And searches worked! I was happy.

Until Thunderbird simply stopped working for one of my e-mail accounts. I could send mail, but new messages simply stopped appearing. This made me miss some important events. I was pissed.

In desperation, I went back to Apple Mail. It’s search function was a broken as ever, which was an annoyance, but at least I reliably received new messages. It worked.

Today I notice one of my inboxes hasn’t had any mail show up in a week or two. Could Apple Mail be broken for it? Indeed, it was. Worse, Apple had broken the configuration part of Apple Mail. It basically forces the most dumbed-down, bland, hyper-defaulted, hyper-normal situation on you, then “intelligently” tries to guess if that’s wrong, and if so gradually asks for more information until it “intelligently” concludes it works. Well, on one account, it was “intelligently” deciding the account was working fine, even though new messages never showed up.

Worse, there’s no way to tinker with all the settings of an account anymore. You’re not supposed to. That’s the job of the “intelligent” Apple Mail client. I tried deleting and re-adding the troublesome account twice (the only way I could figure out how to adjust all settings), to no avail. I gave up.

I notice that Thunderbird has been updated since I dumped it. So I update, and the account that didn’t work previously… now does work again. Whatever Thunderbird bug broke it has apparently been fixed. So change partners again.

Nice to have a more rationally-designed display of incoming messages, but I don’t expect this partner to last, not after doing years of the E-mail Client Dance. I fully expect to change partners again within a year or two.

Published at 07:34 on 9 April 2014

I’ve been using Mozilla’s Thunderbird client to read my e-mail since last fall, when Apple Mail’s antics finally got to the point that the camel’s back broke. (The final straw was when message filtering mysteriously stopped working for my work computer. The amount of messages I receive at work make it absolutely intolerable for filtering to not work; it’s a must if important messages that impact my ability to do my work well are to get noticed instead of buried amongst massive numbers of unimportant messages.)

Yesterday morning I notice that Thunderbird is definitely eating messages on one of my inboxes. They simply don’t show up. Sometimes, they show up but a week or more late, in one big batch. There’s no clear reason why. So far the only explanation I’ve found is to delete “bad” messages that “confuse” Thunderbird, and to be sure to “compact my folders” regularly.

Well, sorry. Neither should be my responsibility. None of those “bad” messages confuse Apple Mail or the Squirrel Mail software I use to read that mailbox over the web. Moreover, it is not my responsibility to babysit a program which is incapable of managing its own databases by manually “compacting” files. I’m busy enough as it is without having to add extra busywork to the picture, busywork that makes me miss important communications and thus mismanage my time if I don’t do it.

So the search for a mail client that does not abjectly suck resumes.

Published at 15:10 on 27 January 2014

This phone is tempting, despite still having all the disadvantages inherent in a smart phone.

Alas, I suspect the temptation to be mostly academic. If the phone can do all which is claimed of it, then expect the government to promptly ban it. If not officially, then behind the scenes by getting the cell phone carriers — who have a track record of being the willing lackeys of the surveillance state — to agree to not support it, by deliberately crippling their networks, if need be.

The latter wouldn’t be hard to do; just block all serial numbers in the Blackphone’s range.

Published at 18:34 on 1 December 2013

I’ve put up with it’s broken search function for years. Searching in Apple Mail depends on a fragile and basically broken indexing system that is typically out of step with the actual contents of a mailbox file. Upshot is that a search typically fails to find the message I’m trying to locate.

Then filtering mysteriously stopped working. I had set up a battery of filtering rules to ensure that the torrent of low-priority messages I get on my work computer get shunted to one of two low-priority folders, leaving the main inbox folder for messages that typically have higher priority. This was even worse, as important messages were now getting buried in the torrent of low-priority babble.

The last straw was when deleting mail suddenly stopped working for my Gmail account after I upgraded to OSX Mavericks. I’d delete a message only to have it immediately pop back into existence. OK, time to get off my butt and stop procrastinating about dumping Apple Mail, now.

After a little bit of research, I downloaded Thunderbird because it seemed to have fairly good ratings and I could download it for free right now and start using something that was hopefully not fatally broken.

The first pleasant surprise was configuring my inbox. It was shockingly easy compared to how painful it typically is in Apple Mail, where there always seems to be a crucially important setting buried in an obscure submenu which has defaults to the incorrect value.

The second pleasant surprise came when my messages were displayed: the display looked much like the old Apple Mail did, before Apple started playing games with the display of the inbox in various ways which always seemed to reduce the number of message subject lines and senders you could see at a glance.

The third pleasant surprise came when I set up filtering. There was a most useful “From, To, CC, or BCC” option which let me define in one rule what it took creating four rules to do in Apple Mail. And the filtering actually worked, instead of silently failing for no good reason.

The fourth surprise happened today, about a month later, when I set up Thunderbird on my home computer. I have a bunch of email accounts, and one of them is on a discount hosting service and has some truly strange options. I saved that one for the last. Before I got to it, I noticed Thunderbird flashing a message about checking its database of mail server parameters when I configured one of my other inboxes. So that’s why things “just work” and I don’t have to fight my way through obscure sub-menus. Could it be? Yes: I enter that final account, the message about checking the database flashes, configuration parameters found, done, even the obscure one “just worked”!

And searching works, too.

Published at 18:12 on 1 December 2013

Probably the biggest reason Javascript-infested websites suck so mightily is AJAX. Every GUI widget no longer simply operates local to the browser; in the background things are talking to the server for every little thing you do. This makes pages act erratically if your Internet connection is anything less than rock-solid and high-speed.

Making matters even worse is the tendency for JS-infested pages to re-invent the wheel. Instead of using standard buttons and other widgets, it’s all implemented from the ground up in Javascript. Unlike the standard widgets, these JS ones violate the look and feel of what the rest of your computer is doing.

Add that to the erratic behavior that AJAX causes with anything less than optimal network connectivity, and you have a recipe for an unusable web page. Do I need to click on that widget or not? One click or two? Does its color indicate it active, or disabled? Did the click I made register, or did AJAX make it vanish due to network flakiness? Or is the response just delayed? Oh, it did something! Was that my first click (with an unwanted second response coming when the network catches up), or my second one? And so on, and so forth.

Mind you, I’m not saying “never use Javascript”, just “use Javascript with great caution, and only when there’s no other way to do what you want (and are you sure it has to be done in a way that requires Javascript in the first place?)”.

Javascript’s proper place is as a seldom-used last resort, not as a commonly-used first one. Browsers work best when they run functional and descriptive code such as HTML and CSS, not procedural code such as Javascript. They also work best when user interaction is handled “off-line” (i.e. completely locally by the user’s computer), not “on-line” in an AJAX fashion.

Published at 13:39 on 30 November 2013

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. Nothing underscores the slogan which comprises the title of this post more than trying to read your email via the Web while riding on the bus.

Mobile internet connections are never as fast or as solid as normal wired ones. Google Mail is awkward and unpleasant to use and iCloud is basically unusable. Yet reading my third inbox on a discount hosting service using the plain-Jane Squirrel Mail web software is a snap.

And if deep-pocketed big businesses like Apple and Google can’t produce a Javascript-infested web site that behaves properly, just what sort of hope do developers with far more modest resources have?

Published at 20:57 on 14 November 2013

I care so much about programming languages principally because I don’t care about computer geekery that much, at least not as much as most computer programmers do. I can’t really geek out on learning a programming language. Just give me something that’s simple and well-designed and therefore not much work to understand and use.

That me averse to overly-complex languages like Ruby, Perl and particularly C++. Why would I want to piss away my valuable time becoming proficient in one of those when for less investment in time I can be proficient in something simpler and easier like Java, Python, or C#?

It means I can spend less time worrying about computer programming and have more brain cells to devote to other things.

Published at 08:05 on 6 October 2013

It turns out that the NSA are indeed doing the sort of efforts to compromise entry and exit nodes and do time-based analysis (amongst other attacks) that I hypothesized about. However, it seems they are having less success than I believed they would have.