07:23 – Happy Birthday to me. Today I turn the big Six-Oh.
Barbara’s dad still isn’t doing very well. I’ll stop over to visit him sometime today, and talk to the staff to see if I can find out exactly what’s going on. It may be a treatable infection, but we’re worried that it’s renal failure that’s causing or at least contributing to the problems. If it does turn critical, Barbara and the rest of Dutch’s family have instructed Brian Center that they don’t want him transported to the hospital. Brian Center is to contact Hospice. If Hospice has a room available, they’ll transport him there. If there’s no room available, Hospice personnel will care for Dutch at Brian Center until and if a room becomes available.
09:36 – I’m filling four liters worth of 30 mL iodine solution bottles, which reminded me that it’s time to get more iodine. So I just ordered 250 g of ACS iodine on eBay. I don’t have an account there, so I bought it as a guest. When I was filling out the address information, I entered our city as “Winston Salem” rather than “Winston-Salem” because the hyphen gives a lot of ecommerce systems fits. The page refreshed and told me to enter a correct city name. So I entered “Winston-Salem”, which it accepted. Geez. So then I get to the page where I provide my credit card information. The address was already filled in with “Winston-Salem”. When I clicked on Continue, the page refreshed and told me to enter a correct city name. So I deleted the hyphen to make it “Winston Salem”, which it accepted. Double geez.
Happy $3C birthday! Or should I say happy 03CH birthday?
Oops, the hexadecimal thing doesn’t work so well. At least it will work for my next few birthdays. I turned 30, $30 or 030H on my last birthday!
Everyone knows octal is the greatest number system in history.
Have a happy 74B birthday, old boy.
Happy 111100
I just had an annoying experience on a MAC. I needed to connect the MAC to a networked Konica Color copier/printer. I downloaded the driver file from the Konica website. Idiots compressed the file using Stuffit so now I had to download and install Stuffit. There is really no need to compress files with high speed connections or at least provide a non-compressed file to download.
Installed the driver, nothing shows. But I add the printer, providing the IP address and the Konica is one of the printers shown.
But the printing options dialog box has almost zero parameters. I want everything to print in black, not color. That is not available in a dialog box. Idiots again. All that is available in the dialog box with W7.
So how to set the options. Google is your friend. You have to use http://127.0.0.1:163 in your browser to get to the printer settings. Idiots again. That connects you with CUPS, which has several options. But there are no options to set the printing as black only. The only color settings I found cannot be changed. You can change them on the page, save the settings, but when bringing the page back the options have not changed. Idiots again.
Apple is either easy to accomplish something or next to impossible to figure out and when do find a “solution” it sometimes is like pissing in the wind.
Congrats on the round birthday!
“Apple is either easy to accomplish something or next to impossible to figure out and when do find a “solution” it sometimes is like pissing in the wind.”
How is this Apple’s fault? Did they write the driver? My HP color laser is networked and my Mac has exactly the options you mention in the printer dialog. HP wrote the driver.
Happy 60th Birthday! Be sure to give Colin his fair* share of the cake.
* fair by your measure, not Colin’s measure. We all know what is the fair measure to a dog, the WHOLE cake!
And Octal sucks! Hexadecimal rules! And Binary is cool!
OK Bob, what do you think about Sulfur-Lithium batteries?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57587919-76/sulfur-based-tech-the-answer-to-burnable-lithium-ion-batteries/
http://www.ornl.gov/info/press_releases/get_press_release.cfm?ReleaseNumber=mr20130605-00
Looks like it might need a slightly elevated temperature to run at, 60 C. And I noticed that they are looking at 300 discharge cycles which seems low to me. Other than that, sounds awesome.
How is this Apple’s fault? Did they write the driver?
I never said it was Apple’s fault. I said “Apple” meaning the Apple platform. I suppose I could have said OS/X and left Apple out of the picture. Would that have made you happy? The real idiots are the zit faced socially inept propeller heads at Konica that I think wrote the driver.
I don’t really know who wrote the driver and I don’t care. However, the obscure method to get into the printer settings, which works for all printers regardless of who wrote the driver, is part of OS/X and Apple, as in Apple the company, is indeed responsible for that part of the code.
I would wager that if you used the same obscure method to get into your printer settings you would find many more settings than are available in the dialog boxes. I also have an HP printer configured on the MAC and found many settings available via the WEB interface than were ever available in the dialog box. Why have the settings if you are not willing to expose the settings in a dialog box instead of some arcane web address? Wait I know. So the people in the Genius Bar at the Apple store can stay employed.
I’ve found using Windows or OS X no more difficult than one or the other. I believe you work in a mainly MS environment, so having that one Mac probably sucks. No one wants more of a learning curve.
I still don’t see what is obscure. I’d wager there are a lot of printer drivers that don’t have everything that you can find on the server page. Page counts come to mind. HP puts a button on the driver dialog that takes you right to the server page in OS X to the preferred browser. The manual also clearly lists the how to get to the server page.
I use VMware with W7 for some apps. The driver under W7 doesn’t list all the server page options either for my HP.
All I’m saying is, when it comes to external hardware, the maker is responsible. If an OS doesn’t support something, the hardware shouldn’t be listed as compatible or as only partially compatible.
I’m not an Apple fan boy, but the Genius Bar comment sounds like a cheap shot. All you had to do was Google and you had your answer.
Happy Birthday!
Looks like it might need a slightly elevated temperature to run at, 60 C. And I noticed that they are looking at 300 discharge cycles which seems low to me.
The temperature and charge/discharge cycles may be from an industry or government standard for evaluation of batteries. Alas, I don’t have access to those standards any more. Unfortunately, the two links to the actual paper are of no use. One is a bad link to a DOE database (but their 404 page has a form to fill out that catches the source and destination URLs and allows you to put in an email address and comments!) and the other is to the journal where it is being published and is behind a paywall.
They are a long way from production batteries, several years at least. It’s one of a number of nano-material battery technologies that have been tested in the lab recently. My alma mater, Rice, developed a carbon nano-tube wire that is as strong as copper and as conductive as silver, yet many times lighter. They have licensed it to a company for production. (As a tie-in to our host’s post today, it’s doped with iodine.)
Happy Birthday, Robert; you are having your big 6-O approximately six weeks before my own; I’d had the impression somehow that I was older than you; guess not. I’m just a kid!
I’m not an Apple fan boy, but the Genius Bar comment sounds like a cheap shot.
Not if you have ever been in an Apple store. I needed to swap out my iPhone and had to wait while one of the geniuses was working with a couple of customers. I was not impressed but considering the questions that were being asked the customers were really clueless. The Genius Bar should more aptly titled “People with more intelligence about computers than the customers that purchase the computers” but that probably would not fit on a business card.
I use Google a lot, for Apple and for Windows. There is too much to know about everything to absorb it all. And I forget more than I would like to admit.
It is frustrating for all platforms and is not isolated to Apple (er OS/X) platforms. I find the Macs we use not much more difficult than using W7 having crawled around both platforms for several years. I have yet to figure out why the OS/X will sometimes tell me, the administrator, that I don’t have permission to accomplish a task, like deleting a file.
The most annoying thing about OS/X is the writing of hidden files to any storage device, network, local and USB. Had a memory card full of pictures corrupted because OS/X blindly wrote to the device, without my permission, without checking to see if there was room to write the data.
My rant was really a slam against the clueless software writers who take everything for granted and write software that is really difficult to use. Apple developers have hidden a lot from the users and you could make an argument both for and against such behavior. I personally don’t like it. But hearing some of the questions at the Apple store from some customers I may be off base and isolation might keep people from having more serious problems.
I never could get the printing to the Konica to print only in B&W. Tried multiple settings and they seem to be ignored. The settings were there in the driver for Windows, why not for OS/X? Such a setting is not a critical setting but a useful setting that should be exposed to all the users. But in this case not only is it not exposed, it apparently does not even exist (or work).
“I have yet to figure out why the OS/X will sometimes tell me, the administrator, that I don’t have permission to accomplish a task, like deleting a file.”
So fah, in my experience, OS/X, Red Hat Linux, and, infamously and often, Windows, will do that to me. Even when I AM the admin. Really annoying. Windows is also infamous for blithely writing all kinds of shit to files and drives without telling us.
So OFD sez: Fuck the geniuses at Apple, Microsoft and Red Hat. No need for this stuff; does anyone at any of these joints ever do a customer experience study? Have actual real people, normal homo sapiens sapiens, sit down at their machines with their operating systems and work them for a few weeks before they release them???
Windows is also infamous for blithely writing all kinds of shit to files and drives without telling us.
I have never had Windows, or Linux, write anything to a USB connected memory device without my explicitly writing something. It was especially annoying with OS/X because the CF card was full but OS/X blindly wrote what it needed and trashed the CF card. I had to use recovery software to recover the images as the apparently the directory structure got destroyed by OS/X. Recovered all but a couple of the images on the card.
Have actual real people, normal homo sapiens sapiens, sit down at their machines with their operating systems and work them for a few weeks before they release them?
I think the answer is no. Especially the coders, zit faced cretins with the social life of big foot. What is relatively intuitive to them is buried 23 menus deep or only available through some arcane command line string. I used to suffer from some of the same traits until I had to actually watch the users of my application deal with what were stupid decisions on my part.
“…to actually watch the users of my application deal with what were stupid decisions on my part.”
There it is. Make those rat-faced little shits sit there and observe a regular user before they even dream of releasing their code. The social life of Bigfoot? We really don’t know what kind of social life Bigfoot has; gotta be better than mine!
Usenet, Google, Dogpile, etc. has answered 99% of questions I’ve had over the years. I’ve haven’t called Apple, MS, HP, etc for 10 years. They never have the answer. The net does. My two trips to the Genius Bar for hardware malfunctions were quick and pleasant. I always get an appointment and they were timely.
Oh, same deal here; I stopped long ago bothering to call hw or sw people at the companies for the products they sell to us, except when I have to do it for a job. And even then, as a sys/net/security/database admin I relied, as did everyone else in those positions, on the net search sites, daily, if not hourly.
I remain thankful for the legions of ordinary users who document their problems with stuff and have solutions.
My rant was really a slam against the clueless software writers who take everything for granted and write software that is really difficult to use. Apple developers have hidden a lot from the users and you could make an argument both for and against such behavior. I personally don’t like it. But hearing some of the questions at the Apple store from some customers I may be off base and isolation might keep people from having more serious problems.
There is a story about Steve Jobs going around that he had his geeks write an app for the Mac to burn CDs with. They worked on designing the user interface with all kinds of options, speeds, file selection and the entire kitchen sink. Three months later they had a meeting with him to approve their design. Jobs listened to them for five minutes and then walked to the whiteboard. He drew a file drop box and a button labeled “burn”. He then said that is your design, do it.
Jobs wanted his machines to be easy to use for your dear Aunt Sarah. He has succeeded in this at the expense of flexibility. Guess what, 80% of the population cannot use a computer any better than dear Aunt Sarah. Apple has been successful beyond belief with this mindset. If you want to gain flexibility (but not sophistication), use Windows. The kicker is that we programmers have been thrown for a total loop. We don’t know whether to design for flexibility or for simplicity.
I remain thankful for the legions of ordinary users who document their problems with stuff and have solutions.
Wow, is that ever true and even an understatement. Me too! Google and http://www.stackoverflow.com are Godsends.
The most annoying thing about OS/X is the writing of hidden files to any storage device, network, local and USB. Had a memory card full of pictures corrupted because OS/X blindly wrote to the device, without my permission, without checking to see if there was room to write the data.
That means that OS/X did not recognize the file system on the device and thought that the device was unformatted. So it formatted the device for you (without asking) and wrote it’s files there. You should be thankful! Not.
Windows will do this for you also as it blindly overwrote a partition table for me once and my carefully prepared dual boot system went into the bit bucket. Really torqued me off also!
Went to that stackoverflow site just now and had a laugh; right away saw an RHEL install error thing; we had more crap go on with those, whether on a single new machine or doing a kickstart across a cluster; part of the blame was the organization’s seemingly random file locations and descriptions but there were always RH bugs, too.
Well, not my problem anymore right now; waiting for the background check to clear or not for a nice spanking new Windoze job at yet another large corporate defense contractor, etc., etc. Gotta learn the latest and greatest Windoze server stuff, but one advantage I have is that I just came from two years of 95% CLI use on an hourly basis and the new paradigm for Windows sys admins is CLI, baby, all the way! Get on board with that and PowerShell or start learning the fast-food window queries about fries and suchlike.
Gee, anybody think the Obummer Admin is out of control? Apparently every three letter agency has spied on the entire population. Obummer has proven himself to be the weakest leader in our history. Most transparent admin ever, my ass! 2014 will be interesting. I may even follow some elections now.
Happy 50 (base 12) birthday, RBT. Though I’ll note that counting the number of times the planet has orbited the sun (heliocentric theory) or the zodiac has gone through its cycle (geocentric theory) seems rather arbitrary. Why don’t you keep track of how many days old you are? Better yet, how many hours old you are? You should be 21915(base 10) days old today, more or less 525960(base 10) hours. Neither of those numbers is nice and round and worthy of celebration. Neither is 10823 (base 12) or 559B (base 16) days. I suggest you wait another 85 days and celebrate turning 22000 (base 10) and then celebrating turning 11000 (base 12) 186 days after that.
“I may even follow some elections now.”
Why? You think we’ll continue to have them?
That means that OS/X did not recognize the file system on the device and thought that the device was unformatted.
Device was FAT32 which is the normal format for camera memory cards. The Apple computer recognized all the files on the drive so I don’t think it formatted the CF card but cannot be 100% sure.
Another time I had all the users files on the MAC completely disappear, gone, nowhere to be found. Called Apple and the final response was “We consider this an isolated incident since there is nothing about this in our database. Because the incident is isolated we will not enter the information in our database.” Stunned I hung up and searched the web. Others had reported the problem and the only solution was good backups. Fortunately I had such but it took several hours to get all the stuff back.
Jobs wanted his machines to be easy to use for your dear Aunt Sarah.
After spending time at the Apple store getting my phone replaced and listening to these people I am not so sure that goal was obtained.
Make those rat-faced little shits sit there and observe a regular user before they even dream of releasing their code.
Agreed. Wish someone with your wisdom OFD had shown me the failure of my rat-faced little shit days long ago. My code was very clever and fast but usability sucked. Until I spent time on the teller line watching the tellers. I then went back and worked on making the stuff usable. Little things such as making numeric entry entirely free-form. Decimals, commas, dollar signs anywhere in a field were handled properly. No more fixed format input. Tellers were extremely thankful by not having to enter “100.00” (old way) rather than “100” (new way) for a $100.00 deposit. Saving three keystrokes was actually significant in their productivity. I learned then to sacrifice CPU cycles to make the user experience better. Hardware is cheap and easy to add, people no so much.
My two trips to the Genius Bar for hardware malfunctions were quick and pleasant.
My trip was not bad. But I had a hard time explaining that I wanted a different iPhone than what I had. Mine was only GSM and I wanted the GSM and CDMA model. They had sold me the wrong phone initially. The genius did not understand the difference. Got a manager and got the swap. Even upgraded from 32 gig to 64 gig without issue.
What did impress me about the genius in the Apple store was their patience with the other customers that were having issues. Whomever trained them in people skills did a stand up job.
I do have to say the two times I have been in the Apple store the experience was much better than some of the computer stores of the past that have long since gone out of business. Perhaps there is a reason Apple stores continue to survive and actually thrive. The one close to me is always very busy with about 15 Apple people and 30 to 40 customers.
Gee, anybody think the Obummer Admin is out of control?
Yep. And got caught.
Got caught but so what? These sons of bitches have two more years to do their worst. And they will, rest assured.
Happy Birthday, Robert.
Interesting comment on the hyphen/no hyphen issue. For years I have watched the entire world of ecommerce websites completely miss the point (with just a few notable exceptions.
We have in the USA and almost fail-safe system already provided to solve such issues with city names. It’s called a Zip Code. If site designers would just collect a user’s zip code FIRST, then not only would all the spelling variations automatically go away, collectively thousands of hours of server time, currently spent chastising customers on their spelling errors would be eliminated.
I was so naive about this simple solution I even bought a web site for the service years ago … zipfirst.com, but no one who could benefit from the process seems interested.. Always time to do (and code) things wrong and not enough time to do it right (and cheaper and easier).
And people say business (and the economy) are slow and all the good ideas are gone ….
NSA has direct access to tech giants’ systems for user data, secret files reveal | World news | The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data
“The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.”
“The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.”
I have been suspecting this for a long while now. Somebody needs to go to jail. A lot of somebodies need to be fired. This is a travesty. What happened to our right to privacy that has been so talked about since Roe vs. Wade?
And again, it is a foreign newspaper releasing the story.
Well, there was the right to privacy found in the penumbra or something in the U.S. Constitution by rabidly pro-death justices and that was all well and good. No such right to privacy exists for us Mundanes as the National Security Empire battles this heroic and valiant Global War on Terror, which may yet prove to be as huge a success as its War on Some Drugs. Where the right to privacy also does not exist.
No one is going to jail at the NSA or from anywhere else in the criminal regime which rules us now; they are not even required to reveal their budget, the billions we are forced to give them at virtual gunpoint. They’ve long had the capability to do this, and only now is it being made public.
Anyone see where this is going? This regime has copied and refined the totalitarian methods used by other state entities in modern history, so far without the mass executions and concentration camps and gulags. A plethora of secret police and intel agencies; the so-called Patriot Act; the drone program, hitherto used to blow up women and children in the Sandbox and the Suck and we’re now being told it can legally be used to blow up our shit here as well, particularly if some bureaucratic bonze decides we are some sort of terrorists ourselves. All that and a fiat currency and economy that they are deliberately destroying with malice aforethought and endless wars overseas; “War is the health of the State” said the very late Randolph Bourne and he sure got that right. Trouble is, it destroys all it touches, one way or the other, eventually. To be used ONLY as a very last resort.
You say this stuff only gets reported in foreign media? No shit. Ours has been blinded, deafened and castrated long ago.
Regarding the lastest spying revelations: I wish people would stop blaming this on the current Obama administration. That’s wrong, in the sense it implies that the Republicans would be any better. These programs are nothing new, and were likely put in place with the Patriot act or shortly after, with full bipartisan support. Once in place, they took root and grew, like any other government program. The whole D/R dominated government is to blame.
There is a well-written rant in the Ars Technica comments: If all of Turkey is protesting because the government wants to pave over a park, this warrantless spying ought to have people on the streets in every city in the country. Of course, the collective American populace will just shift slightly on the sofa, fart, and change the channel…
– – – – –
@OFD: If you don’t know StackOverflow and (more suited to your work) StackExchange, you should definitely give them a try the next time you have problems to solve. The way they are organized means that good answers are pretty easy to find. That’s always assuming the problem *has* a good answer, of course.
Happy Birthday, Bob!
I don’t blame the current mess exclusively on this particular administration; the national security state/empire was firmly established in 1947 by Truman, Dulles, and Co. It’s metastasized ever since; this administration has accelerated the program, however, and they now have two more years, or longer, to ratchet it up further.
Key watershed moments in U.S. history have been: the secret proceedings of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787; the Great Eliminator’s invasion and destruction of half the country with malice aforethought; the empire’s first overseas adventure with the Spanish-American War and then Professor Wilson dragging us into the Great War; Pharaoh Roosevelt II’s machinations with Scotus and the New Deal; the 1947 caper; and most recently the Patriot Act and NSA.
The question may be turning out to be which occurs first; the consolidation of total State power in this country or the economy tanking and the structure disintegrating under them.
I regard all of the NSA / CIA / FBI / etc. spying as a bunch of Peeping Toms. What is the difference between reading our email and reading our letters? Or peeking in the windows of our bedrooms at night?
Jerry Pournelle says it best, “But we were born free”.
Well, as I’ve been saying for at least 40 years now, the growth and intrusiveness of government won’t end until it’s ended forcefully. Jefferson thought we should have a revolution every 20 years.
We’ll be fighting in the street,
With our children at our feet …
We’ll be fighting in the street,
With our children at our feet …
I can see that I need to buy more guns and ammo. BTW, when I was in Academy the other day, I saw a sealed ammo ground storage case, suitable for burying. Just saying.
And it won’t get ended forcefully until the population is in a position to do that, which won’t be until the current system finally collapses of its own weight, decrepitude and rot and their soldiers and police stop defending it.