Silicon Valley Redneck

VerizDroidGnutls WTF???

My old droid-o-phone, with the default mail app and Verizon's 3G service worked fine with my somewhat-dated exim4 mail server, using TLS on port 25.

Same settings don't work on the new phone, unless I'm on WiFi.  Port 25 blocked on the 4G network?  OK, so make Exim also listen on port 465.  Now it's not blocked, but I get the "a TLS packet with unexpected length was received" error on the server, whether using WiFi or 4G.  Fiddle some more, turn WiFi back on, and discover that changing the server setting from "Use TLS" to "Use SSL" works.  A test message gets through!  Hooray!  Now turn WiFi off, and make sure it plays nice over 4G.

Oops.  All else being equal, changing from local WiFi to 4G gets me back to the "unexpected length" error.

Er... surely end-to-end encryption ought not to be affected by the network in this way... right?

Maybe I need to try K9-Mail (which I tried when the old phone was new, and there was some issue, possibly involving battery drain, but much may have changed in 4 years).

And another rant is on the way

But I'd probably better keep my mouth shut on this'n 'cause it involves pending work.

General topic, though, would be one of those Trending-Buzzword-Compliant programming conventions that throws out an established, fully flexible approach for something that's new and looks pretty but has no flexibility whomsoever: what ya codes is all the user gets.

Looking on the bright side...

...I'm glad I didn't panic and sell a chunk of Intel last week.

On the other hand, had I sold it, according to the Old Plan, in the summer of 2000 when it was at $75, I'd now be living in a nice big patch of Pacific Northwest forest (but still pondering a move to get away from the Californians who seem to be ruining Oregon and Washington).  But I got a new job with a startup, and my accumulated vacation time accordingly went poof, and I haven't had a combination of time and money since.

Prolly have to cut another leg off the pig this summer for one thing or another, but this is according to the Plan For The Year.

A curse on LabVIEW and all who use it!

The past week having been largely eaten by the problem of getting a simple test-automation program to run on a second machine, I feel some cursing is in order.  I'm about ready to consult a necromancer, if not to summon the author of this program then at least to disturb his rest.

We did find the source code... so far as LabVIEW can be said to use "source code".  It's all Ancient Egyptian to me*.  But!  I successfully defanged the apparent copy protection.  Only the code still doesn't run right on any but the original PC.  The failure mode has changed, but it doesn't work.

Now I'm trying to poke at it using student edition LabVIEW (don't worry, we'll compile for delivery using the fully-licensed version).  And: I can poke at the blocks, and kinda-sorta see what's going on, after a fashion... but I can't run the sucker, because the library topology has gone non-Euclidean or something.  Totally obscure error message, to which the solution might be either "keep all the source files in exactly their original locations, and don't even think about working on a copy of the project" or "re-install LabVIEW and try again."

 

* 𓀜𓂗50-46-5D-90-76-BD𓂀𓍝𓂶"X < 0 ? 2"𓁸𓂏𓃫; yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Hmmm: Looking at this page on my phone, I see only the latin-alphabet text.  If the footnote lacks hieroglyphics, you may not have a full set of Unicode on your computer.  Or something.

Further evidence that cats are chaotic evil

Alas, I didn't have a camera handy to capture the moment, but:

Huckleberry just summoned Great Cthulhu!

He climbed up on my desk, reached waaaay up, grabbed Cthulhu by the foot, and pulled him down.

Now he's playing with him.  Toying, even.

Never leave your Great Old Ones where a cat can get ahold of them.

Update: He tried again, and I had a camera handy, but the stack of papers whereon he was standing included a thick tome of slick cover and rather less than letter-size cross-section, and his wicked plan failed amid sliding papers.  Let this be a lesson to you: never use An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations as a stepping-stone for evil.

Update 2: I can haz Great Old One?

Feetnote: From the bottom of Huckleberry's foot to the bottom of Cthulhu's foot is just about 34 inches.  Did I mention Momcat looked to be a Maine Coon?  And the fuzzballs are still growing.

Aieeee!

Got back from spending bucks at Verizon to upgrade fom a 4-year-old HTC Incredible to a shiny new Droidd Maxxxx (nice big screen for my aging eyes), and was preparing to set about migrating my stuff, when I discovered...

...that my laser printer, only a couple of years old, which had been working this morning, now appears to be defunct.  As in, it shows up properly as a USB device, but then disconnects, then reconnects, ad infinitum or until the OS gets disgusted.  Tried power cycling the printer, rebooting the server (which had been prompting me for a reboot for a few days now), replacing the USB cable, plugging the USB cable into the workstation instead of the server... no soap.

Maybe if I let it rest overnight it'll feel better in the morning?

Maybe there's cat hair forming a blanket and causing a chip to overheat?

And this hasn't exactly been a good week for earning the bucks, either, what with days spent trying to deal with malfunctioning (possibly copy-protected) software on a fixed-price job.

Blrgl.

Still trying to complete the half-day task, begun last Thursday afternoon, of delivering a simple test fixture.

Which involves installing the software to make it work.

Which, I'm increasingly suspecting, was locked to a specific computer, most likely with some identifying information compiled into the binary.  And, had I a Ouija board, I might be able to get some answers....

Anyway, it's on Windows 7.  Which, coming from XP-if-you-insist, and Linux/KDE for preference, is... ugh.

Want to turn on display of hidden files, and of file extensions?  The options for that used to be in the "view" menu of the file manager.  Now, the file manager no longer has a menu.  Options are set only via the control panel.  And you're supposed to know this.  Intuitively, like.

And: want to search for files modified between last June and the beginning of this year?  In XP, you click "Search" in the file manager, and "All files and folders", and "When was it modified?", and there's an option to enter a range of dates.  Cool!  In Windows 7... there's a little search box in the file manager.  You can type in a glob-style name pattern, or get strictly kindergarten-level functions by clicking on things, but to do a date-range search you need to type in a text-based filter that's in a poorly-documented language, almost as obscure as find but much less powerful, and that doesn't bloody work.  I get just enough results to tell me my syntax wasn't wildly off, but nowhere near as many as there ought to have been (and not including files that are in plain sight and match the criteria).  I think the answer may be "boot a Linux live CD, mount the Windows filesystem, and use find."

I don't know much about boats...

...but the basic nature of the problem here is a no-brainer.

Yeah, the chattering nitwits go on about how the boat's sides weren't properly supported, and there was maybe a problem with the dolly used, and so it sank, and... nope.

First observation: it didn't sink.  Did quite the opposite, in fact.  It floated like a cork.

Someone mentioned maybe not enough ballast?  Try: no ballast at all.  Ya want a boat like that to stay upright, ya gotta put heavy stuff in the bottom.  This clearly didn't happen; the bottom just floated right up.

Then it bobbed around like a plastic toy.  (Was the engine even installed?)

A former project leader was worried about it being too heavy for the dolly?  Imagine how too-heavy it would have been with the ballast!

Into the realm of irresponsible speculation: maybe it was already too heavy for the dolly, and the PHB decided to launch it first and add the ballast later?

(Via Dave Barry.)

Of spare parts and clutter

Or, the part is always in the bin you can't find.

My middle mouse button is getting unreliable again.  Definitely needs replacing.

I'm sure I saw a bag of suitable buttons around here within the last couple of weeks.

Now they're nowhere to be found.

And I don't really want to replace the whole (cordless) mouse.  Though: relative value of time and money... right at the moment, I've got a pile of revenue work waiting, and half an hour working for an hourly client pays for a pretty nice mouse.  But, then, a Fry's run would take about as long as repairing this critter... if I had the replacement button right in front of me.

Things get hectic.

OK, so more hectic.

Originally on the agenda for the past week:

• Finish assembling, and deliver, a duplicate of a test station from last year.
• Various Linux- and database-related work (plus some other stuff) for GrannyCo.
• Tidy up some low-priority loose ends for ToasterCo (while anticipating that some interesting high-priority projects will be materializing later this year).
• Go see an optometrist about new glasses (being as how I'm on my emergency backup pair, and they're in kinda sorry shape).
• Poke my head in at the Design2Part Show.
• Get Tinga to the vet for a checkup.

What actually happened:

• The GrannyCo work was at about the expected level, but with several changes of priority.
• I did manage a quick wander through D2P, taking at least a quick look at each booth, and chatting with various people.  One guy occasionally contemplates selling his little house in Los Gatos and moving to someplace less expensive.  he'd recently been on the phone with someone in North Carolina, and inquired: "How much house could I get there for 800 grand?"  Stunned silence.  He's maybe thinking of buying a tobacco plantation?
• I did get to the Wally World optical department Tuesday afternoon, plunked down rather a lot of money (eye exam, good lenses in high-index plastic, and durable frames), and was useless for the rest of the afternoon on account of my eyes being out of focus.
• Multiple aspects of one of the "maybe soon" ToasterCo projects (which I'd first, and last, heard of back in February) suddenly bubbled to top priority.  We had a meeting Friday morning, and suddenly I have a New Project (one goal of which is to recycle as much as possible of the design for the Extreme Toaster Controller from a couple of years back, because the National Extreme Toasting Program was cancelled, leaving ToasterCo with a bunch of expensive, high-spec parts in inventory).
• Oh, and that test station delivery?  I spent all afternoon Thursday turning on a client-supplied brand-new Dell Win7 PC, waiting for the updates, downloading and installing supporting software from the Knights Who Say NI, and generally futzing around with stuff that ought not to require my attention.  Finally, a little after 5, I was ready to connect the test station and try to run the test application (tech support for which is via Ouija board these days).  It didn't work.  It behaved very oddly indeed.  User interface is flaky, it doesn't initialize the I/O correctly, and it fails to reach "ready to begin test" status.
  Friday afternoon, back to it.  Figure maybe there's a version incompatibility between the latest libraries and the ones the app was written for.  De-install all NI software, and install the old version.  (This took most of the afternoon.)  Try again.  Still FUBAR.  Swap various components with the original test station.  No fix.  Finally give up and take everything home.
  Saturday morning: hook the test station up to my Win7 lab PC.  As the bench is cluttered, I run the app from the next room, using rdesktop.  The UI appears to behave itself, but after I get through the initial steps the app seems to be in a tight loop rerereading a config file.
  Running it locally at the workbench gets the same wonky results as at the client site.

I'm developing a strong suspicion that there's a Very Nasty Bug in Windows, the NI GUI libraries, or the interaction between them.  The test app has a fixed-size window, meant to fill the screen of a 1080P monitor, so running it on anything less means the right side and bottom of the window aren't visible.  Terrible, right?  Well, it looks like the program also screws up royally in this situation.  It's like the portion of the window that doesn't fit the display is overwriting application memory or something.

Not having a 1080P monitor around here, I can't test the hypothesis that using the right monitor would make the app start working.  But I'll nudge the client to dig one up for Tuesday.

Oh, and I never did get Tinga to the vet.

And my 4-year-old HTC Incredible has reached the end of its working life (design life, 2 years).  Technically, it probably only needs a new battery (the old one now being good for less than a day of standby time), but it also has a case of software rot, and I figure it's time for a 4G model with a bigger screen anyway.

Update:

That test-station software issue?  Well, it does behave very differently depending on whether it's run locally or via Remote Desktop... but the root problem is starting to look like it was node-locked to the computer we delivered with the first station.  Having worked on copy protection schemes back in the day (office software for Data General minicomputers!), I recall notions of making it basically seem to work, but to be broken in some subtle way that wouldn't point to copy protection*.  Which is nasty, but... could very well be that's what's going on here.  Anyway, the late boss's granddaughter has dug the old development machine out of storage, and is looking for protection code and how to defang it.

*For evil example: a pirated spreadsheet app might introduce small random errors.

Pseudoscientific logic

Related to some stories that have been making the rounds lately, and of course to the witch hunts of the 1980s.

• Child psychologists have determined that infants cannot understand the difference between fantasy and reality.
• Therefore, very young children cannot, properly speaking, be said to lie.
• Therefore, anything said by a child* is true.

Amazing what you can do by quietly shifting meanings.

 

* For values of "child" up to, maybe, 7, or 12, or 19, as circumstances demand.

Sore foots.

Just back from the Maker Faire.  About 5 hours on my feet, on pavement, in the Five Fingerses.  Note for future: when walking on hard surfaces for extended periods, consider wearing something with more padding.  And maybe socks.

Anyway: plenty of Big Art, and some Big Commercial Stuff.  Some Cool Little Hobby Stuff, too, though that's been diminishing since the early days.

Crowded, noisy, but still fairly fun.

Collected a pocket full of business cards and little flyers for things that might be of interest eventually.  Didn't buy anything except some rather nice jam.  (Technically, I suppose it's "preserves" or "spreadable fruit" or some such thing, but to this barbarian it's all "jam".)

Afterthoughts:

First Thing spotted on the way in was some guy in a wooden suit with a pipe wrench for one hand, and a giant mechanical hand for the other.  Maybe a wooden tin-basher, as a counterpart to the Tin Woodman?

Lotsa 3D-printing stuff on display, including a junior model with a $200 price tag.  Doesn't have the capabilities (build volume, dual extruders, heated build platform, dunno what else) of my $1200 unit, never mind the Real Professional Units, but still: cool, and cheap enough for the typical family to get, just for the kids to play with.

Many strange vehicles on display... though not so many as in past years.  Moderate number of flaming sculptures (and no 20-foot-tall flaming Dalek, unless I somehow missed it).

In which I attempt to pass the ideological Turing test

There's this new development, see, in stem cell work.  Involves cloning a patient's own cells:

 

... the researchers used healthy oocytes from donors, removed the eggs’ nuclei and substituted a nucleus from the somatic cell of the adult patients. The cells were then ‘jump started’ by electric pulse into developing like a normal embryo.

At the blastocyst stage, the scientists were able to derive stable embryonic stem cell lines ...

All of which sounds wonderful, from a medical perspective.

But here's the thing.  If one grants the premise that a human blastocyst is a person*, then this is an abomination.  Such a person would be as innocent as anyone could conceivably be, and sacrificing an innocent to extend the life of an adult would be a grotesque form of... vampirism, maybe?

If throwing virgins into volcanoes actually prevented eruptions, would it be an acceptable practice?

Heck, I don't have the answers.  I just see that there's a great big question here, and a possibility of sliding into the most appalling moral degeneracy.

 

* I don't, incidentally; hence the title.  However, I have no scientific nor theological grounds for denying it, either.

Grrr.

Looks like Eternal Emperor's accounting department has screwed up again.

I switched my coverage to one of the new plans, effective May 1st.  Got a new card, with the same account number on it.  I'm reasonably sure that when I filled out the form, I told them to bill my credit card on a recurring basis, so as not to have to be at my physical mailbox to receive the bill.

I just got two bills.  One for next month, on the new plan.  One for next month and this month, on the old plan.

Looks like I'll be spending a chunk of Monday morning on the phone, dealing with someone in a call center in a location chosen for low labor costs.

Update: Monday morning ended up being Tuesday.  Spent several minutes on hold, then got someone who was actually helpful, terminated my old coverage retroactive to May 1 (thereby killing off the big bill), and confirmed that I am on auto-pay for the new coverage.

Wasn't today supposed to be cooler?

I thought the forecast was for a fair amount of cooling today.  It hasn't happened.

Though, instead of a heat advisory, Weatherbug gave me a tsunami alert today.  The second of the month, if memory serves.  Tapping on the alert got me "no alerts", again.  Searching the news, I find reports of an earthquake in Micronesia, with the information that there was no tsunami warning.

Out walkies, early, as I passed through the little farm on my way back, the chickens scurried over to the fence.  I had to explain to them that I hadn't brought enough hat to go around, nor did I have chicken feed in my pockets.

Oh, well.  Been getting a little work done, on two real projects for clients.  One hardware, one software, so I get to bounce back and forth between desk and workbench, which I suppose is better for my back than sitting at my desk all day.

(And: the Venerable Jeep passed its biennial smog check.  Which keeps getting more expensive.  Well, by the time the next one comes due, I expect to be well out of California.)

Another format annoyance

Back to the PostgreSQL/PHP thing (with some Ruby to follow).

Got a column of type interval.  Normally holds something on the scale of seconds.

Thing is... what comes out isn't just a number of seconds.  If I store '4 seconds', what comes back is '00:00:04'.  Which, should I ask PHP to interpret it as a number, is, er.  Zero.

No worries; PHP has at least one function for parsing time formats.  Except that it wants either an absolute date and time, or an offset from the current time.

And there's the threat that the interval might get into days, which probably results in the format changing.  (Quick check: it does, but only to including a days field, e.g., '1000 days 03:04:37'.)

So, either I write a parser for SQL interval formats in PHP (which, come to think of it, I may have lying around from a long-ago project)...

... or I say the heck with it and change the data type to integer.  Which is Not As It Should Be, but saves hassle.

Incredible tales that make no sense

Still filling odd bits of time with Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds; currently on Witch Mania.

The tales that were told of what the witches got up to... well... that anyone believed such accusations just boggles the imagination.  Or, rather, it would, if I hadn't heard Democrats talking about Sarah Palin and apparently believing the stories they told each other.

And some of the accusations make no sense whatsoever.  Like: witches had the power to summon Satan to do their bidding.  They then used Satan's power to do Satan's bidding.  Huh?  Why couldn't Satan just do his own bidding, and cut out the middlewoman?  This makes as much sense as grassroots public-interest groups lobbying the government to wield more power to do things that the ruling class wanted to do anyway... uh, wait.  That happens, doesn't it?

Given the remarkable parallels between events recounted throughout this book (in all sections, not just the witches), anyone who could read through it and still believe in the Unconstrained Vision would have to be the sort of nutjob who dominates public discourse today.  (See also: Gods of the Copybook Headings.)

How about IPv5?

The NSF is looking for a newer, better, shinier Internets.

In terms of underlying protocols... IPv4 is pretty darn good, in its place, keeping in mind that it was designed for a more civilized age, and that its architects weren't really expecting to see billions of nodes on the global network.

Then we have IPv6, a bloated monstrosity which allows networking every electron in the known Universe, and then some.  While it has a great superfluity of addressing capability for the Internet of Doohickeys, it's fantastically complex, and enough trouble to implement and use that, after all these years, it's still largely failing to catch on.

So... maybe fall back to something in between?  How about a cleanly layered protocol (which TCP/IP never was), with enough addressing for all the plausible needs of a medium-sized planet (64 bits ought to do it), and the IP- and TCP-analog layers being about as simple to implement and use as v4?  Include hooks for security layers, QoS, and so on, but don't require those features as part of the baseline.

And: be mindful of overhead, especially since much of the expanded addressing is needed to deal with tiny devices with limited bandwidth.  Look at how poor 6lowPAN has to break IPv6 packets into many little 802.15.4 packets, just because the header is so huge.  Including a sub-IP protocol layer for channels with tiny packet sizes might be nice, too.

But, with gummint grants being involved... expect bloat.

Dizzy.

Oy.

Woke up this morning somewhat dizzy.  Kinda the feeling I have after being rudely awakened, when my metabolism hasn't had a chance to get out of sleep mode.  Only I woke up in more or less normal fashion, a few minutes before the alarm light was to come on.

Caffeine, a warm shower, breakfast, and exercise: none helped.  The world refuses to hold still, and I have to move very carefully to avoid being thrown off.

This does happen, once in a while.  Always first thing in the morning; usually it clears up after a while, but sometimes it lasts all day.  No clear idea what causes it.  Insensitivity to breakfast and exercise suggests it's not blood sugar.

It's probably just as well my metabolism didn't get properly started today, given that it's 92 degrees blisteringly Fahrenheit.  But I kinda didn't get any work done.

Hmph.

PostgreSQL has a handy datatype: macaddr.  Automagically handles input in various formats, and reads back in canonical form, with colons between bytes.

It's for a 48-bit Ethernet MAC address.

It doesn't - duh! - handle 64-bit Zigbee MAC addresses.

I have to handle a mixture of both, mostly Zigbee.  (If I were being strictly proper, I'd follow the procedure for promoting 48-bit addresses to 64 bits, but that's not on the priority list just now.)

So, I guess I use a text column, assume for the moment that each address will always arrive in consistent format, and worry about canonicalization later.