Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:43 on 12 January 2014

I played with making jewelry out of hardware store items a bit about five years ago. The results got noticed and got approving comments, but at the time I was too wrapped up in other things and basically put that embryonic hobby on hold until later. I had (and still have) plenty of hobbies and interests competing for limited time.

Last fall I decided that “later” meant the coming winter. So I’ve been slowly acquiring the things I need to experiment more with making jewelry, starting with a workbench and tools. Since what I’m doing is unconventional (mainly copper and brass, while most resources focus on silver), I thought it might be useful to relate my experiences and research here. I plan on doing so in subsequent articles under the category “metalworking”.

Published at 09:07 on 10 January 2014

Apropos this, I disagree with the answer in the headline. Science may be harder than other subjects but I also found it much more interesting than other subjects. It was always my favorite subject in school. Difficulty is not an obstacle if a subject is interesting.

Yet, I almost dropped out from a scientific major in college. The issue wasn’t the work, it was that the work was mostly ritualized bullshit that had very little to do with actual learning. And most of the professors obviously cared more about their research than their teaching.

On the latter point: why shouldn’t they? Excelling as a teacher seldom gets one the recognition and rewards that excelling as a researcher does. Any professor who prioritizes teaching over research has chosen to buck the system and sacrifice formal career rewards for the intrinsic reward of doing well at a job s/he enjoys and values. The latter is admirable, but it’s not the way to get a set of professors who typically value teaching as the number one priority.

So, there I was, struggling with lots of BS homework that was getting in the way of side projects I was doing on my own that were leading to real learning. Mathematics and physics were particular problems, since I comprehend both in different ways than most. The lectures, books, and assignments were mostly mystifying and comprehension could only come as the result of extensive pondering and research on my own.

There were two straws that almost broke the camel’s back. The first was when honor students would come to me, the student who was struggling to keep a B- grade point average, asking for help with key concepts they were incapable of grasping. The second was my difficulty of of getting courses taught by my favorite mathematics professor (one of a select few who did not mainly mystify and confuse me), who also had a reputation of being one of the hardest professors in the department. In response to students avoiding the hard professors, that department had a policy of not publishing who was going to be teaching various courses, which frustrated my desire to get courses taught by that professor. It became clear to me that formalized education was a mostly corrupt institution with little overall net value.

I persevered, but got out as soon as I could with a B.S. degree and refused to consider going further. If I’m to be assigned lots of busy-work that gets in the way of my self-directed learning and exploration, I figured I might as well get that busy work in the form of a job where someone else pays me to do it, as opposed to at a university where I am paying for the same nuisance.

Published at 19:19 on 12 December 2013

It is time again for the yearly ritual of copying my contacts from this year’s Slingshot Organizer to the next. It’s something of a chore, but it also forces me once per year to do the necessary task of purging old and obsolete information. Moreover, I keep all the old Organizers and use them as a sort of back-up device to the current one I am using.

Yes, I’m old fashioned. I’ve rehashed this several times before and won’t bother doing so again. Suffice to say I’ve considered a smart phone and concluded it just doesn’t suit me as well as more traditional technologies.

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 08:44 on 25 November 2013

I don’t care how frustrating and unprecedented the Republican blocking of judicial nominees is, and how hypocritical the Republicans are for opposing the same nuclear option they were advocating enacting when the tables were turned.

The tables will turn again, and when that happens the Democrats will sorely regret “going nuclear” as right-winger after right-winger sails through the Senate and onto the bench.

The foolishness of the current herd mentality is so transparently obvious that it is simply staggering that so many seem unable to see it.

Moreover, it will be made all the worse because the Republicans, unlike the Democrats, are firmly committed to their ideals and willing to pursue them with full vigor, so the rightward shift by the Republican appointees will overwhelm any leftward one put in place by the Democrats.

Published at 20:46 on 15 November 2013

After electing a corporate Democrat to the mayor’s office to replace a bumbling* but at least non-corporate incumbent, Seattle elects a socialist to the City Council.

* And yes, McGinn was bumbling and incompetent. But I’d rather have someone incompetent at doing good things than someone competent at doing bad ones. Of course it’s sort of academic at this point since I’ve moved out of Seattle and have no plans to move back.

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 21:03 on 18 October 2013

Some time ago I wrote a post about D-STAR. It’s time to revisit the technology and do some quick summarizing.

D-STAR is an Open Standard

Maybe in an abstract theoretical sense, but in practice, it’s proprietary. Only one major ham radio manufacturer (Icom) supports D-STAR. None of the others have announced any intention to. In fact, one, (Yaesu) has come up with a digital protocol of their own. Plus, there’s plenty of hams utilizing used P25 digital equipment. So not only is it not “open,” it’s also not really a “standard.” The actual standard for local VHF/UHF voice communications remains FM, because that’s what all manufacturers support, and what the vast majority of repeaters continue to use.

D-STAR is the Wave of the Future

Highly unlikely. Digital modes in general are the wave of the future and will probably eventually displace FM and most other analog modes for most communications. But it’s hardly clear that D-STAR is the technology which will prevail. In fact, its lack of widespread adoption argues against it being the digital technology which will prevail. More than likely, that will end up being some yet-to-be-invented mode which offers far better weak-signal performance than either D-STAR of FM, and audio quality at least as good as current analog modes. That way, users will put up with the unavoidable “fall off a cliff” because it will happen significantly further out than where FM starts getting a bit hissy and choppy.

D-STAR, being Digital, Offers Better Audio Quality

No, it doesn’t. It offers worse audio quality. This isn’t CD-style digital audio we’re talking about; there’s significantly less bandwidth available than that on a ham radio channel. Circumstances dictate a slower sampling rate and very aggressive compression. Lossy compression. Quite audibly lossy compression, in fact.

It gets even more dramatic in weak-signal situations. Like all digital modes, a D-STAR signal quickly “drops off a cliff” when usable range is exceeded. Audio gets totally lost, first little bits, then big bits, then all of it. And it’s a much more disconcerting and intelligibility-compromising loss of information than one gets in analog FM, where rising background hiss provides an early warning and the drop-outs are not so sudden or so total.

D-STAR Is Needed Because We’re Out of Repeater Pairs

Maybe in Manhattan, Tokyo, or LA this is the case but for the vast majority of the Earth’s surface it is not. Most places have plenty of repeater pairs available. Others, such as most big cities that fall short of being megalopolises, might be short on empty repeater pairs but the repeaters themselves end up being mostly empty (you can listen all day and you’re lucky if you as much as hear another station ID). There’s plenty of room for more chit-chat.

D-STAR Therefore Is Useless

Not so fast. Nothing says you must use it for voice. There’s two parts to D-STAR, a CODEC for moving between the analog and digital worlds, and a way of sending streams of bits over the airwaves. The former is actually where most of the cost for the equipment comes in (since it’s a proprietary CODEC), while the latter is 100% open. So if you need a digital point-to-point link, the technology has some use.

In other words, it’s a specialized mode for special applications, not any sort of general-purpose replacement for FM.