Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Giving Chrome Another Chance

Back in February, I reported my intention to try Chrome as a replacement for Firefox. A week later, although most parts of the experiment went well, I reported that Chrome was useless for printing in Australia (or anywhere that uses A4 paper).

That was a blow, but I hoped that Google—despite their complete contempt for bug reports from their users—might one day rectify this issue. Naturally, when they did fix it, they did not announce that in any place that was useful to me and so I discovered the fix by accident. If I was cynical, I might even think they had fixed it by accident. But I won’t go there.

At any rate, now that Chrome appears to be able to do almost all the things I need, I’m going to drop Firefox again and see if I can manage with just Chrome. That’s where I’ll find out if “almost all” might really be “all”—if Chrome can manage with 12 windows and 180 tabs open, which is what I currently have going on this desktop. In fact, if it’s at least only half as clunky and slow as Firefox, that will be wonderful.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Coles Puts Customers Last

For ages now, all the Coles supermarkets I use have had a nice simple EFT setup. While the cashier is scanning your purchases, you could swipe your loyalty card if you had one and you could swipe your credit/debit card and select your account. At the end, you could quickly enter your PIN, wait a few seconds for the receipt to be printed and be on your way.

Today, the local Coles introduced a new "improved" system that finally took into account the chip on your debit/credit card. And, at the same time removed the little bit of streamlining that everybody has become accustomed to. You can no longer do anything with the card reader until the cashier has finished, and you can't swipe your loyalty card at all—that difficult task is now reserved to the cashier. So you wait, then you insert your card, then you wait until the machine is ready, then you select your account and wait a bit more. Finally, you get to enter your PIN. This all adds a noticeable delay to the checkout process.

Coles, it's not an improvement at all and there's just no excuse for it.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Gmail Spam Detection Is Good Enough

In the past 30 days, Gmail has successfully tagged 8712 spams with a mere handful of false positives (which have now been flagged) and only three false negatives. I'm happy that this is good enough for me—as of now I will no longer review the spam folder.

If you email me and get no response at all and think you should have got a response, this may be a result of your message being flagged as spam. In that case, feel free to follow the advice in the Contact tab of this blog.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Is Oracle the new SCO?

I avoided Java for many years, partly because I thought it was a failure in language design and partly because I found Sun's tight control disconcerting. I avoided Solaris because of Sun's tight control and because there were plenty of satisfactory alternatives.

When OpenSolaris appeared, I began to experiment with it. It still felt risky, but operating systems are much easier to change than the languages you use to create software with, so the risks seemed acceptable. When Sun made moves to open Java up, I began to consider using it or, more likely, other languages that built on the JVM.

Then Sun fell in a hole and I put things on hold. I had some hopes for a takeover by IBM, based on my belief that that they might continue the Sun stuff of interest in a way I could live with. That might have been unduly optimistic, but is now irrelevant. IBM went away and Oracle stepped in. Oracle is not a company I have ever admired in any way and it is run by a man I find even less admirable than Bill Gates. But many analysts, who claimed to have better sources of information than I have, seemed to think that Oracle would probably continue with OpenSolaris and would certainly nurture Java.

Now it appears that OpenSolaris is dead. And Larry Ellison has decided to tackle Google over Java. I have no idea how that will unfold. I do know that Google have the money to withstand a legal challenge. I'd like to see Oracle do a SCO and collapse under the legal mess, although I fear that they might survive. I am certainly going to avoid OpenSolaris and Java for the next few months or years. I'm also starting to think about alternatives to OpenOffice. I'd love big Oracle customers to announce that they are going to walk away from Oracle because they can't rely on Oracle's ability to survive.

At least database technology is pretty much a solved problem and alternatives to Oracle exist and others can be created. So it will be possible for people to drop the Oracle database money pit. Getting everybody to walk away from their Java investments will be much harder, but I'd like to see people considering that too. At least I have nothing to lose, having no investment in either Java or Oracle. But I will be cheering for anybody who helps to cut the ground from under Oracle.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Why I will vote for the Greens

I've voted Labor all my life, not because I like their colours or the dress sense of their leaders, but because their policies have been generally in accord with my own principles. I've never voted for the two big conservative parties because their policies have been (and remain) focussed towards meeting goals that I believe to be unethical.

And, until now, I have never voted for a minor party—mostly because their policies are either single-issue or unethical (or both). However, the continuing drift of Labor to the right and the abandonment of policies that are of fundamental importance (the environment; the treatment of women, minorities and refugees; the education and health systems, to name several) has made me look harder at the alternatives.

In the past, I was not impressed by the narrow focus of the Greens or by their lack of real policies beyond their principal focus. And I have been unimpressed by some of their preferences decisions. But they have come of age at a time when the major parties have descended into irrelevance. The Greens now have real and ethical policies on most of what I see as the important issues of 2010.

Obviously, the election on 21 August will return us a government controlled by one of the two major parties. But now seems like the right time to tell them something about how people really feel. So, if you think the Greens are right about at least some of the important issues, do what I'm going to do—put them first in both houses of parliament and then give your second preference to the major party of your choice. If you're lucky enough to find the Greens' preference allocation meets your needs, then vote above the line. Otherwise, do what I do and take the time to number every box below the line. It's not hard and we only get to do it once every three years. Seems like a small price to pay to put pressure on whoever is the government to start doing the right thing.

LCA 2011 — Call for Papers extended to 14 August

BRISBANE, Australia – Sunday 15 August 2010 – Good news everyone! Due to a large number of requests, the deadline for the LCA2011 call for papers has been extended for an extra week.  They will now close on Saturday, 14 August 2010.  Unfortunately, no further extensions can be granted after this date.

The organising committee is pleased with both the quantity and quality of proposals that have been submitted to date and are still accepting proposals for

  • Papers
  • Tutorials
  • Miniconfs
  • Posters

Please read the Information on Presentations page before submitting your proposal, to give yourself the best chance of being accepted.

Call for Papers Deadline is now: Saturday, 14 August 2010

Friday, July 16, 2010

In Which I Yield to Powerful Forces

As long ago as it was possible, I began running my own mail servers. Over the years, I employed a variety of software and hardware and for the past decade or more I've had to run antispam software as well. I did it partly to avoid the alternatives (which were pretty unsatisfactory in the early days) and partly to understand the process in case clients needed help with their mail servers.

Happily, I am now without clients. And the alternatives might not be so bad. But I am stubborn, so I decided to solve my most recent problem by setting up some new software on a VM in the USA. The problem I was solving was the increasing unreliability of my ADSL connection—not through any fault of my excellent ISP, but because Telstra appears to have a policy of letting the copper infrastructure decay sufficiently that any successor won't be at all glad to be saddled with it. At any rate, there have been no spare pairs in my street since we got the last pair five years ago. Since then, we've had line faults after every heavy rain and it takes between three and seven days to fix things, where "fix" means find the wet joint, dry it out, patch it up and say "she'll be right now mate."

So I looked at all-in-one solutions for email, in the mistaken belief that there would be something out there that I could more or less just drop into place on a VM, do a bit of DNS magic and sit back happily. I looked at Horde, Zimbra, Zarafa, Courier and a couple of others whose names escape me now. They probably are all capable of doing the job, but all require a great deal of dedicated setup and they look as though they need a fair bit of care and feeding once they are operational. None of them looked like what I wanted and I started thinking that if these were the answer to my question, I must have asked the wrong question.

So I considered Google. I've had a bunch of gmail accounts ever since it was launched. I don't particularly like it, although that's mainly just me. And, for various reasons which I can't talk about here, plain gmail accounts don't work for much of the email I have to provide. But Google Apps offer a bit more than just gmail, so I thought I'd spend a little bit of time investigating. I gave myself a maximum of one day to complete this and in fact needed much less. I now have all email addressed to my 11 operational domains going to Google Apps accounts for me and my wife. Nobody has to change the email addresses they use, and the outgoing email looks as though it still comes from where it always did.

And Google's antispam stuff is awesome. So far, we've had a few thousand emails arrive and every spam has been caught without a single false positive. It's so good that I'm going to stop checking the spam folders now. This is so simple that it's a total no-brainer for me. The only possible downside is storing our email with Google, but that is easy to fix via their nice API that allows you to download it all for storage wherever you like.

Well, the other possible downside is that my wife might spit the dummy when she returns from seven weeks in Europe on Monday and discovers that she is not using exmh any more. But it will be too late and I hope it won't end in tears. At least she has been using one of the ordinary gmail accounts every day while she's been away, so she is familiar with how it works.

Friday, July 9, 2010

Filter Stubs Toe Again

This is all over the news and the blogz, so I won't clutter the place up with URLs. The Conroy train to idiocy has been declared late due to some purported efforts to get it right, which appears to mean delaying it until after the election at least.

That counts as good news, although it's only a tiny step. Perhaps they will quietly abandon it after the election. Somehow, I don't think that will happen. So I suppose I'll have to start thinking about the cleanest way to opt out, as there seems little likelihood that Conroy will do a u-turn and switch it to opt-in.

When you consider that none of the bad guys will have to think about this—since all but the utterly insane ones would have opted out of showing their illegal habits to the government years ago—it's a bit annoying that the good guys now have to bestir themselves in order to opt out of the filter. At least there's no real rush and this can just go on my long todo list.

Part of the problem for me is that my spouse is a psychotherapist who has to deal with victims of child abuse and, less often, with the abusers. She has good reason to look for materials that, while in no way exploitative or deserving of special classification, could easily trigger imperfect software that was supposed to be "protecting" us all from the evil ones.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Politicians and Pimps

Most politicians give me the same icky feeling that I get from the pimps in red light areas and they seem to come from the same part of the intellectual spectrum as well. A local candidate has letterboxed me asking me to tick the four issues that most concern me from a list which has no mention of the environment or detention centres or refugees.

The old graffiti on a wall near my childhood home that exhorted people with the slogan Don't vote—it only encourages them seems more and more apposite as the years go by.

To link my little political rant to the ostensible topic of this blog, it would also be nice to see politicians get a clue about the evils of things like software patents, internet censorship via technical means, copyright and so on.

Rant over. Here's hoping they get the election done promptly.

Friday, July 2, 2010

Foursquare Privacy Fail

I've been seeing a number of friends take up with foursquare and I've seen quite a few mentions of their service in the blogs, so yesterday I thought I'd have a look at it and signed up. Bad timing. They chose to get embroiled in a story of a privacy policy that describes something quite different from what they deliver.

That's not the bad part. All of us make mistakes. Rapidly-growing startups probably make more than most. I like it better when people don't make mistakes, but I can live with it—unless it's a matter of life and death. And I can live with the mistakes if the same people don't make a point of repeating the same mistakes all the time.

The thing I can't abide is people and businesses who make mistakes and refuse to admit them or try to conceal the mistakes from the affected people. A recent story in Wired claims that Foursquare Puts Money Before Privacy and backs that up with plenty of data. Read it.

I'm getting sick of companies that don't even pretend to care about their customers and my policy has hardened in past few months. I had already cancelled my Facebook account because of their behaviour—not that you can cancel with them. They just treat you as if you're having a little time out and maintain your account regardless. Major fail. I'm not planning to do anything with foursquare now.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Comments Policy

After six years of blogging on a platform that did not provide comments, I now find myself with a blog that does do comments, so I thought I should alert existing readers who might not have noticed this change and take the opportunity to mention what passes for a comments policy.

All comments will be submitted for moderation and will appear next time I'm awake and can review them. The obvious evil things will be discarded. Abuse will be discarded. Anything really off-topic, as perceived by my fairly loose definition, will be discarded. Anything else will appear.

I'm hoping to see some interaction now that I've taken this plunge.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Programming Languages

People who know me will be aware that I've been exploring the suitability of various programming languages for some software that I want to work on. Abetted by my ADHD/Aspie brain, this has been a bit like Alice falling down the rabbit hole into a world of weirdness. As the weeks go by, my collection of potential languages has grown much faster than my ability to do any of the evaluation that I was planning.

For the record, the list now consists of x86 Assembly Language, C, Python, Lua, Scheme/Racket, Common Lisp, Clojure, Erlang, Haskell and Javascript (in no particular order). And, if Clojure is involved, that would also mean learning Java—something I have assiduously avoided for the last 15 years. The more I add to this crazy pile, the more sure I am that I must be missing the perfect answer, even though the sane bits of my mind know that there is no perfect answer. Of course, the longer I amuse myself in this pseudo-analysis, the longer I am safe from having to put any work in on any of the real projects on my list.

It would be nice to be able to say that this insight has freed me from analysis paralysis and that I'm just going to start on something. After all, I am good at telling other people that any decision is better than no decision and that even a wrong decision can be easily fixed once it's clear that it was wrong. I'm less capable of listening to my own good advice. However, it has occurred to me that I could just decide on one step right here and now. So, for no reason other than that it's the language I know least about, I'm going to do some work with Clojure over the next week or two to see if it's a real candidate or not. The others can wait.

Monday, June 28, 2010

LCA 2011 is not far away

To be more truthful, LCA 2011 is not far away if you're planning to present a paper, because the all-important call for papers will be going out soon. Time to start thinking about the killer presentation you might want to make. Final conference dates are 24-29 January, 2011 and it's happening in beautiful Brisbane.

I understand that the invitations to keynote speakers will also be going out any day now, so hopefully there will be more to say about that before too long. Having not had a chance to attend an LCA since the last time it was held in Brisbane, I'm really looking forward to this event.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Public Goals

That title has nothing to do with football, just to get that out of the way. I have seen many people in the business of helping the rest of us to sort our lives out who advocate setting goals and committing to them in public as a way of focussing attention on the pursuit of those goals.

I've avoided that for most of my life, but today I'm going to dip a toe in the water and declare a goal of shedding some weight. Forty years ago, I weighed a little under 60 kg. Now I weigh a little under 80 kg. I have added the weight in teensy increments over the whole forty years, at the rate of about half a kilogram per year, and have hardly noticed it happening. But that's heavier than seems healthy for a boy of my build and height, so I have a plan to reduce it.

I have no illusions of getting back to the trim 58 kg of twenty-year-old me. But it seems feasible to aim for 70 kg. To make this concrete, my goal is to lose 10 kg in the next 100 days. If anybody wants to hold my feet to the fire over this, make a note in your diary and we'll see how I go.

I plan to announce some other goals here over the next few weeks, but I also have plans to talk about software before long, so maybe I can combine the two.

Friday, June 18, 2010

Constant Improvements

A couple of days ago, I wrote about a customer service failure at FooBar Motors. I did not identify the company because they generally do a pretty good job of looking after their customers and that's why I keep buying cars from them and why I keep getting those cars serviced by them. The thing I was getting at is that, even when the culture is to provide great service, it's not always easy to get all the details right.

That brings me to my domain—software. We creators of software probably make more painful hoops for our customers to jump through than even the worst car dealership. And, in some ways, we have much less of an excuse: software is infinitely malleable, so we just have to fix it when it's hard to use. But we don't always know that it's hard to use. When we test it, we're kind to it and treat it the way we meant it to be treated. When it resists us, we understand it well enough to gently persuade it to go where we want. When it tells us lies, we don't feel too concerned because we understand why it lied. Besides, it's our baby and we don't like to be told that our baby is ugly, so we resort to that ever-reliable solution—denial.

And of course software is difficult to test. There are so many ways to get where you think you want to go that it's almost certain that a user will find pathways that we neither intended nor perhaps even noticed and which we certainly did not get right. Lots of people have written papers and books and given presentations about the business of software testing and I'm not going to try to push any particular approach on you today. But I think it's really important for all of us who create software to recognize that we are far from getting the testing right and that it's something that we must pay better attention to in the future.