Blackcap Blog

Published at 06:13 on 24 November 2017

Developing a web site to report information in graphical, map form has given me a new appreciation for how much client-side Javascript (a technology I have never much liked to start with) sucks.

In fact, Javascript was never really the first choice for this site. If there was a simpler, purely declarative way to draw a map that used tool tips to display the details of each observation, I’d have used it in a heartbeat. But there doesn’t seem to be, and moreover, the best package I could find for presenting maps used Javascript. So Javascript it was.

The problem is the execution environment for mobile devices. It simply varies too much. For desktop browsers it was fairly easy to come up with a page that worked well with every browser I thought to try. Mobile sites have so far frustrated that desire. What I have works on my iPad, but no friend’s smart phone has made it work likewise. Some don’t let one zoom in at all. Some zoom in but always draw the dots ridiculously small (despite their being specified as 4 pixels in diameter). Some don’t register touches that call the touch callback. And so on.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise, really. It’s not as if most web developers are totally incompetent, yet attempting to use Javascript-heavy web sites on a mobile device is always asking for trouble. Those developers weren’t lazy or incompetent, they were just fighting against a platform that does its best to frustrate portable coding.

The rub is, tool tips are really needed to present as much information as I want to in a single graphic. As such, it’s probably time to realibrate my wants and make Javascript avoidance first and paramount. If presenting that much information requires Javascript, then presenting that much information in one graphic is the wrong goal. Time to come up with a version of the site that is basic, static HTML and point mobile users there.

Published at 10:44 on 21 November 2017

Circa 2011 I dumped Safari for Firefox. Safari had come out with what I term a “turkey upgrade” that made it painfully slow. Plus, Safari’s Javascript engine has always tended to suck. Add to that the recent slowness factor and it was worth putting up with how Firefox’s UI sometimes annoying departs from normal Macintosh standards.

Now Firefox has come out with a turkey upgrade of its own: Firefox Quantum. It’s almost hideously ugly and un-Mac-like. There’s so much clutter up top that the box that you enter the URL to browse to in can almost never display the whole URL at once any more.

Worse, the designers made the atrocious decision to devote the entire top part of the window to the browser tabs; there’s not much place to click on if you just want to move the browser window. You must fight your way to one of the far top corners in order to do that (and “fight” is the correct word, given that it makes it needlessly difficult to move the browser window).

What happens, of course, is that I’m used to Firefox acting how it used to (and, for that matter, how every other Mac program works), where the entire top most part of the window can be used to grab and move it. So I end up grabbing a tab and moving it. Which of course causes the tab to become a window of its own. This is something I almost never want to do. Congratulations, Firefox, you’ve made it easy for me to do something I almost never want and needlessly difficult to do something I often want.

Back to Safari for now.

Published at 18:29 on 15 November 2017

No, it’s not a smartphone. To that, I strongly suspect the answer is “only when there’s no alternative”, as I have written many times before.

It’s a Nokia 3310 3G. I’ve been hoping HMD (the firm Nokia sold their cell phone business, together with branding rights, to) would come out with a version of the same that works with US cellular networks ever since reading that they were attempting a reboot of a classic dumb phone.

We shall see how well it works. One annoyance is that it is incompatible with the Apple headset I use (although I say “phooey” to their smart phones, Apple’s headset is very well-designed, and I strongly prefer to use a headset so as to distance my cranium from the radio transmitter in the phone). That is mostly counteracted by Nokia’s headset having a design that is distinctly better-than-average, and being included with the phone.

One plus is that it has an FM broadcast band receiver in it. That’s something I know I will be using from time to time. The ability to listen to news and music programming without encountering network congestion issues or paying any data charges: what’s not to like about that?

Actually, most cell phones have FM receivers in them; the makers of the chips for such things put them in because a) it doesn’t cost that much, overall; and b) the broadcast radio industry pressured them to do it. It’s just that the broadcast radio industry hasn’t been quite so successful at pressuring the phone manufacturers in enabling these receivers.

Apple is a particularly egregious example; in their iPhones, they deliberately omit making any connection between the lead going to the headset jack and the antenna on the chip, thus permanently crippling their phones by design. Even if you jailbreak your iPhone and install your own software to enable the FM receiver, you’ll still get a whole lot of nothing to show for your efforts.

Chalk it up to pure greed: most phone makers are in cahoots with cell providers, most phones being sold by the providers themselves and being locked to that provider’s network. They want their customers to stream audio and rack up network charges; it means more money for them.

The broadcast industry is naturally upset about that. Greed is in play there, too, of course. They want to have cell phone users deciding to listen to their stations and the commercials they broadcast. More listeners means higher ad rates and more money for them.

I end up squarely on the side of enabling the receivers. First, it’s a matter of choice. Nobody can force anyone to put their phone into radio mode. If one thinks broadcast radio is a vast wasteland*, one is free to not listen to it and to instead choose to stream audio. Second, is a matter of efficiency: broadcast radio has no problems scaling; it’s intrinsically one-to-many. Using it eliminates the problem of servers going down on big news days.

But the biggest argument is emergency preparedness. Broadcast radio is an older, low-tech technology. As such, it tends to be more robust than cell service. At least some stations stay on the air after a disaster takes the cell network down due to a combination of damage and subsequent overuse. Cell phones are battery-powered devices, enabling radio receivers in them to be operated without commercial power. It’s simply in the interest of public safety to have as many cell phones as possible be able to act like broadcast radio receivers.

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* When one is talking about commercial radio, I tend to agree. But that’s not the only option; virtually everywhere I’ve visited there’s been non-commercial stations on FM. In my own area, there’s three very good ones.

Published at 08:08 on 7 October 2017

What astounds me is how much the Establishment media are downplaying the grave and imminent danger of war between two nuclear-armed states both led by irresponsible madmen.

I was going to post something on this, then decided to shelve such plans when the news that Tillerson was secretly talking with the North Koreans came out. Which brings me to these points that Jennifer Rubin recently raised.

What’s wrong, I think, is that Tillerson is cracking under the stress of his job. That also explains why he’s trying to stay on: he has first-hand experience that the US president is in fact a madman, and fears what will happen if his influence attempting to moderate same is gone.

Of course, Rubin’s points are still valid, which means that Tillerson is probably on his way out. But keep in mind that Tillerson’s apparent worries are also valid.

What it all means is that Trump’s handlers are not able to rein in his worst attributes.

Make no mistake, the danger we are facing is now extreme.

Published at 22:00 on 28 September 2017

I’ve been using the Eclipse IDE off and on for several years now, mainly because it’s something of a de-facto standard in the Java world, and I want to be something in sync with that world. Well, forget it. I’ve come to the conclusion that the annoyances outweigh the advantages:

1. The editor is nowhere near as powerful as a stand-alone editor. That should not be a surprise; it’s competing for the attention of the Eclipse dev team with so many other priorities. By contrast, the dev teams working on text editor projects are totally focused on making those editors better.
2. The editor is sluggish. It doesn’t respond as promptly to my keystrokes as any dedicated text editor I’ve used. This frequently trips me up.
3. It’s almost as if it has an artificial intelligence engine working away to decide whether or not I’d like auto-completion to be offered for an identifier… and then does precisely the opposite of what I want. The feature pops up unbidden and gets in the way when I’m rapidly typing, yet never appears when I’m paused, trying to remember the precise name of something. Typing Control-Space remedies the latter situation, but still.
4. Also, the auto-complete for things like parenthesis and quotes is thoroughly evil. It’s always introducing syntax errors into my code, because it comes up slightly too late; by the time it’s gratuitously inserting something, I’ve already gotten a keystroke or two in edgewise.
5. The default is to indent with hard tabs, and you have to change many settings to defeat this misfeature.
6. There is no simple, easy way (at least none I’ve found, and I’ve tried) to stop it from making files with lines that have trailing white space.
7. When upgrading to a new version of Eclipse, nothing is done to import settings settings from any previous version you were using.
8. When upgrading to a new version, the new version will create a new directory for its workspaces, instead of seeing if there is any existing such area in a default location used by a previous version. The default workspace path changes from version to version. There is no overriding pattern to the defaults.
9. There’s no way to do something as simple and basic as renaming a project in Eclipse Oxygen. If there is; it’s very well-hidden; the action is not listed in the same menu that creating, deleting, and copying projects are listed.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was the mess with the workspace directories. I don’t need three separate, inconsistently-named, locations. Yet that is now what I have. And when I attempted to convert and old workspace into a new one, the conversion failed and left some projects inaccessible. I’m sure there’s a solution that would enable me to fix the problem, but it’s simply not worth continually expending effort at making an overly-complex tool behave itself.

So I’m in the process of reverting to a text editor and using that old reliable standby Ant to do the building of my Java projects. A pity, as some of what Eclipse offers (detection of errors as one types, being able to request auto-completion) really is helpful.

Published at 09:52 on 23 September 2017

As much as I disliked formalized higher education, my experiences would have probably been far more negative had I attended an elite private university like Harvard.

Published at 10:48 on 21 September 2017

Yes, that Valerie Plame, Joseph Wilson’s wife, the ex-CIA agent. First she tweets:

Then 90 minutes or so later she makes a feeble attempt at walking it back:

And yes, it’s a feeble attempt. If she “zeroed in on the neocon criticism,” then why mention Jewishness at all, if the problem is neoconservatives? Why retweet the subject, which was “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars.” Not “America’s Neocons” or even “America’s Jewish Neocons”, but “America’s Jews” as a whole. The problem was identified as Jewishness, not political ideology.

That an article so titled would resonate with her (to the point of prompting an instinctive retweet) points to deeply-held antisemitic attitudes on her part. That’s a far bigger problem that a simple “Oopsie!” can atone for.

Published at 13:16 on 19 September 2017

Probably doesn’t even see the irony in making a speech that contains both this:

Rogue regimes represented in this body not only support terrorists but threaten other nations and their own people with the most destructive weapons known to humanity.

and this:

The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.

Published at 10:17 on 18 September 2017

I currently rent a tank from Suburban Propane. Because it’s a rented tank, I must also buy the propane from that supplier.

They’re changing me around $5.00/gallon. Current market price is about $1.50/gallon (I’ve checked). So I’m being charged over three times the market rate. Avarice, anyone?

On top of the $3.50/gallon price premium, I’m of course charged a yearly tank rental fee (even though the tank should be free, given what a cash cow monopoly pricing is for them).

Add it all up, figure in my average consumption, and I can expect the new tank to pay for itself in under 2 years, and possibly after a single year. So it’s basically a no-brainer.

When I called Suburban up to begin arrangements to terminate my tank lease, they of course mention their far cheaper rate for customer-owned tanks, as if I’m going to reward them for their past extreme greed. Fat chance of that.

The only worry is my current apparent inability to find an even remotely compatible employer. My superstitious side worries about jinxing things in favor of being compelled to relocate to someplace more affordable in the near future. That is merely a superstition, of course, but it still gnaws at me.

Published at 09:49 on 28 August 2017

Evening of 20 August

The eve of the Big Show. Or will it be the Big Cloud-Out? There has been a disturbing trend towards more cloudiness over the past few days. Weather forecast for tonight is “mostly clear” and “sunny” for tomorrow, but that has been the general word in forecasts for the past few days.

Oh well. Traffic woes make any location change impractical. “You stakes your claim, you takes your chances” — as I have said for the past month or more.

21 August, 9:11 AM

Skies clear. First contact noted. Probably started a minute or two ago.

Traffic on road, which has increased by a factor of 20 or more in the past week, is strangely absent this morning. Other campers are doing what we are — awaiting the big show.

9:34 AM

High thin clouds are becoming evident. Bah. (Sun still visible.)

9:42 AM

Dimming becoming increasingly evident. Still less than 50% obscured.

The feeling of anticipation before it (first contact) began was virtually palpable. The quietness of the road added to it.

9:54 AM

50%, maybe more. It’s not getting warmer any more. At this stage on a normal morning, it would be. Actually it seems to be cooling.

10:03 AM

Horns [of solar crescent] now at halfway point. Estimate 65 – 70% obscured.

10:04 AM

Several aircraft audible. Air traffic is way up today. Balloons being released from the other camp for the past 20 minutes or so.

10:08 AM

Birds are in “evening chorus” mode. Feels more like 7:00 PM than 10:00 AM. 80%? Dimming is very evident.

10:15 AM

More than 90% gone. Really darkening fast now. Very eerie atmosphere. Getting cooler and cooler.

10:18:30 AM

Just a thin sliver left. Not taking pictures any more. Just focusing on the experience.

Shortly after Totality

Totality lasted from 10:21 to 10:23. Darkness came very fast. Quite cool now. Saw diamond ring. Missed Baily’s beads [wrong; see below]. Clouds thinned [then vanished near the Sun] just before the show.

10:32 AM

Nighthawks came out shortly after totality.

10:42 AM

The exodus is underway. Two cars so far….

10:48 AM (estimated)

Sunlight is starting to feel warm again.

11:37 AM

Basically over. Like it was at 9:11. Tiniest bite. Aircraft all gone.

I Did Actually See Baily’s Beads

I recognized totality was ending because I could see the landscape backlit by the Sun on the Moon’s trailing edge. That is how I interpreted the scene in my mind, not as “Baily’s beads,” because it looked so very much like just that.

Of course, that is exactly what Baily’s beads are. The impression was so strong in my mind that I didn’t even associate what I had seen with the common term for it until well after totality had ended.

Think about that for a moment: the eclipse allowed me to view, with my naked eyes, for a brief fleeting moment, the topographic relief an alien landscape that wasn’t even fully mapped until the Space Age. We’re talking about a relief of perhaps a kilometer or two at a distance of about 385,000 km.