Cool to start but warming rapidly. And humid. Meanwhile, a couple of hours north, it’s below 70F at night, and the leaves are turning…
Did several smaller things on The List ™ at the BOL yesterday. Then I spent a while chatting with my buddy and his wife while evening fell. Finally got all my stuff put away and headed home.
Power had been out in our neighborhood for 2 hours. Wife and kids were grumpy. So grumpy. Can’t put off the transfer switch and gennie work any longer. That is three times now in less than 2 month that we’ve had outages lasting more than 2 hours. Not encouraging.
PC needs work too. I’ll try a new PSU first. Didn’t want to dig it out from under the desk and fall down that rabbit hole again. Not now anyway, but it won’t start up. I miss the days of actual power switches. I REALLY hope the new PSU does the trick. I’m in no mood to rebuild my main PC.
Today though, I’m doing Dr. appointments. One in the morning, one in the afternoon. Y’all said “get checked out” so I am. Thoroughly. Rubber glove and invasive cameras thoroughly. So far, nothing wrong. There are still places they haven’t yet looked though. Those places are next. Joy. At least we still have a medical system, and it still works reasonably well.
If you’ve got any mystery issues, or anything that might need attention, this is as good a time as any to get them looked at. I’ve put it off as long as I could, but that was dumb. Our world could change tomorrow. It does that periodically. Don’t get caught wishing you’d had something fixed while you had the chance.
Stack up some health care… while you can.
nick
Too many skeletons in that closet.
He’s hanging tough on Impeachment because his schtick is wearing thin in The Villages.
Of course he’ll vote for any spending package Corn Pop negotiates with McCarthy.
Hot and dry is back in Austin this week so the entire grid will be strained every evening as the dweebs plug in their Tonymobiles and crank the AC to 72.
ERCOT now has a page tracking peak demand records.
https://www.ercot.com/static-assets/data/news/Content/peak-demand-home.htm
Ah, I love high quality software. After the power meter swap this morning, I couldn’t talk to the EV charging station. It was working fine, but I couldn’t talk to it on the mobile app. The error message was really informative: “something went wrong” (ok, it was German: “etwas ist schief gelaufen”). Literally, that’s all it said.
There is a web interface that I haven’t used, but there it says I have to register the charging station through the app, before I can see it in the web interface. So that didn’t work. What ultimately worked was to delete and re-install the app.
I figure for the next time I’ll register the station with the web-UI. The instructions are very simple: go into the app and select “add station to web UI”. Just one small problem: there is no such menu entry. Planned but forgotten? Removed in a later update? No idea, but half-an-hour of fiddling reveal no way to do it, as documented or any other findable solution.
Do these people ever actually test their own software?
Yes, but the man-hours to make the fixes are never approved, or the update is never approved to be pushed to production, or …
There are bozo programmers and bozo DBAs and bozo web site admins, but my decades of experience tell me that most of the glaringly bad design decisions, user interface atrocities, unfixed bugs, and outdated contact information are because of the managers making bad decisions.
Used to really annoy me in the days of W3.1, W95, W98, etc. A message stating “Incorrect DLL loaded”. Yeh, right. 3,290 DLL’s and one of them is incorrect. Would it not have been helpful to at least specify the name of the DLL?
Much software states messages like you got. “Something went wrong”, “Unexpected Error” (when is there an expected error?). Some software just hangs, does nothing. Idiot programmers that are too lazy to expand the error messages so that some meaningful solution could be found. Reinstalling the OS, or App, is not a reasonable solution.
My favorite was when I ventured into Linux. I could not find the manual and asked for help. Most of the responses were “RTFM”. The rest were “if you don’t know the answer, you are too stupid to run Linux”.
Actually feels a bit chilly this am. No muffins or coffee for me, as I have another test this morning. Realized that late last night and ate something, but not enough as I’m hungry and thirsty. Only a couple more hours to go.
—————————–
I guess we’re getting into bankruptcy season. Two of my auctioneers have bankruptcy auctions this week. Well, they might be voluntary liquidation of a business, but from an auction point of view they are the same. Everything goes to the walls.
n
“An error has occurred”
“A voltage spike has been sent to the software program manager’s anal implant. ”
Home invaders get an armed greeting from apartment resident
https://bearingarms.com/camedwards/2023/09/18/home-invaders-get-an-armed-greeting-from-apartment-resident-n74980
There will, of course, be more to this story. Random targeting of an occupied apartment is unlikely.
But the bad guy count is down by at least one, and that’s a good thing.
From yesterday regarding the Chrysler plant in Belvedere, IL:
I worked there for a period just after the Carter Administration. We made Omni/Horizon econoboxes at 90 cars per hour, 2 shifts. Remember those? I hated working there. Think Lucy Ball at the chocolate line. But I LOVED payday.
No A/C, so Summer evenings were brutal. Especially for the guys using the steam stretchers for the upholstery line. Those guys would dress like strippers and round robin switch themselves out in 20 minute chunks.
just look at the last entry:
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2023/09/19/okay-lets-talk-about-that-missing-crashed-f-35-n579010
Good software testing cost money, so….No. They don’t test it.
When I worked for DEC, there was a company-wide initiative for I18N. It required some level of retraining for everyone who develped software, but most of all for those who did end-customer product development.
So you’re in the groove, coding along, and you realize that your piece of code could have an issue at line 1024 if the user had done something out of the expected order, or if an asynchronous data request had not yet completed or some such. In your development code, you put a message like “Terminating due to missing data from frobozz”, where “frobozz” was a clear indication of what’s the matter.
Now you’re approaching turning your code into an actual product. To meet the corporate standard, all messages spresented to the end user must go through a messaging interface, where the message is reduced to a single number, and the interface is coded initially in English, but a simple module switch and –poof– all the messages are suddenly French or German or Hebrew or Arabic. Never mind that the messaging interface lacked flexibility, so messages with variable content were difficult to construct.
Probably poorly translated,but by golly we can pander to people.
Of course, programmers being programmers, you drop the “frobozz” part of the message, making the message less useful. Or even worse, you troll through the text list of possible messages and choose the most generic one that might come close to describing this -supposedly rare- condition.
I was fortunate enough to spend most of my time developing DOD software under contract. The USAF does not require you to present messages in any language except English.
Your new meter is much more recent than mine. I have effectively no way of getting at what mine is doing, except for an industry-standard flashing LED on the front panel. 1,000 flashes per kWh?
Huh, my meters at the house (1 meter) and the office complex (3 meters) were replaced 7 or 10 years ago. The new meters have a little LED panel that flashes the current load, the current time and date, and the cumulate kwh.
The meters are connected to a private network using the electric line, ethernet over power line. There is a backup to the cell phone network.
I found this out when I noticed a couple of workers in my backyard a couple of years ago. They replacing the ethernet over power switch for the neighborhood that had fried itself. They were dedicated to working on the meter networking.
When I was in the USAF in the middle ’70s I, along with 11 others, worked on the base level personnel system. Installed at all the USAF bases world wide. As a joke one of the programmers put an error message in the code, supposedly where it was impossible to meet the conditions for the error.
The message was “Heavens to Betsy I’m feeling quite ill. Please call my boss, Captain Scott Hill xxx-xxx-xxxx” where the x’s were the phone number.
As luck would have it Scott Hill got a phone call, from Yokota AFB in Japan at about 2:30 AM Scott’s time. Yep, the message had appeared on the console. The impossible condition had been met. Scott was not happy, the Air Force base was not happy, the design center was not happy, nor was anyone involved. The result was a clamping down such that any error message would include a unique error code and short text. Phone numbers and names were strictly forbidden.
IBM was notorious for error codes. It was necessary to have a manual to understand the codes. To their credit the error codes were unique and finding the code in the manual generally pointed to the problem.
There are bozo programmers and bozo DBAs and bozo web site admins, but my decades of experience tell me that most of the glaringly bad design decisions, user interface atrocities, unfixed bugs, and outdated contact information are because of the managers making bad decisions.
The other problems are multitudenous. Users are demanding lower and lower prices for annual licences and support contracts. But, the cost of programmers and support personel is rapidly rising.
And like mentioned above, if your product supports more than one language then the cost and difficulty of generating error and warning messages rises rapidly. Especially if the messages are dynamic.
We only support English messages but we try to use the users selected dimensional units for their values to be presented to them. That means a lot of numeric conversions on the fly that could or could not be completed if the software is in the process of crashing. I have seen several cases over the years that an error or warning message caused a bad situation to get worse because the error or warning message formation was not tested properly.
“No More Astronomy Photobombs? SpaceX Shows Off Starlink Satellite ‘Mirror Film'”
https://www.pcmag.com/news/no-more-astronomy-photobombs-spacex-shows-off-starlink-satellite-mirror
“The ‘dielectric mirror film’ on the second-gen Starlink satellites is designed to scatter sunlight away from Earth, preventing interference with ground-based astronomy.”
Cool. Who knew that being a rocket scientist was so complicated ?
Amazon just announced that they are hiring 250,000 employees for the holidays. Wow. Is Amazon closing in on Walmart ?
“IBM was notorious for error codes”
. ILF281?
Probably not, but close. ca. 1970, it was trying to tell me that a multipunch was missing on a job control card
Developers don’t want QA jobs. It is usually an over 40 ghetto at a lot of shops.
The only professional job I walked out of without notice was a bait-n-switch scheme where I ended up as the only direct report of the company’s original tester, who they promoted to Test Manager to keep happy because he could do the DoD paperwork.
The thing is: a good tester is worth a lot. They have to understand complex requirements and complex software. They use complex tools. They need endless patience. And they need to understand where programmers are likely to screw up.
It’s a different skill set from programming. Related, but different. Most programmers are poor testers, and vice versa.
Plus, of course, you need that rare management that understands the need for human testing, not just unit tests.
Because they cannot see the forest for the trees. What is obvious to a programmer is not obvious to someone that did not write the code.
I wrote some code for guy that owned a business repairing watches. I tested the code, it was solid, I could not make it break. Then I had my wife test the code so I could gloat. She input a lower case “L” instead of a “1” when the code was expecting numbers. The code crashed, hard. Whoops. My wife now gloated. I asked her why she did that and her response was that in typing class they always used the lower case “L” for a “1”.
I learned to test my code on the extreme ends of plausibility. Non-sensical input, numbers out of whack. Non-sensical selections and combinations. It made me a better coder but every once in a while someone would do something that was absurd. The code would crash.
I learned years ago to sit down with the user, watch how they work. Look at their hand movements, how many times they had to move, or click, or type. Minimize that effort and movement if possible. It was a lesson learned that took 10 years. Users are sometimes dumber than a box of rocks, sometimes smarter than the average user. But all think different than code slingers. Use that to an advantage.
WTH? What is going on in Plum Grove, Texas, Governor Abbott?
Cartel money.
“She input a lower case “L” instead of a “1” when the code was expecting numbers. The code crashed, hard. Whoops. My wife now gloated. I asked her why she did that and her response was that in typing class they always used the lower case “L” for a “1”.”
yup
When I code websites and input forms, I always do ‘sanity checks’ of the data, converting it to the proper type of variable, and looking for possible bad input.
I called it “SAD” (Stupid Answer Detection). And then I tested the code like I was an “SP” (Stupid Person).
I sat down for the last sanity test of our company’s “gold master” release version of a GUI to their hardware, and crashed it to blue screen with one click.
I right clicked on a blank part of the GUI.
“Why’d you do that??” “Why not?” (real reason was that the context menu is easier to see than a mouse arrow, and I’d lost the mouse pointer.)
Delayed that release. You might think that they would learn to bring the field guys into the testing process earlier, but what they learned was to not let us touch the software. BTW it’s the software that let us do our jobs in the field… so we ended up touching it A LOT.
n
I once had to put a serial port capture tap on a control touch panel to prove to the developer that it was actually -in fact -really -really sending a command string that caused unwanted behavior. He insisted that there was NO WAY his code ever sent that string. But it did. Only after a certain other series of commands were sent though. It was repeatable once I’d found the triggering sequence. And he fixed it, but not without a lot of grumbling that no one would ever enter that series of button presses. Of course I had, and in the first half hour of testing too.
And then I tested the code like I was an “SP” (Stupid Person).
– the client’s rep and I call it “monkey punching” the interface software. The end users don’t know what they want, or what they should do, they just know that if they press the right thing, they get some result and they do so until they get the result they want. They hit buttons “out of order” and in “illogical” sequences. They work backwards. They repeat button presses, and press quickly.
Most common errors were race conditions, and “off by 1” conditions. “Did you start from 1 or 0 this time?”
n
headed to the liver guy…
“Intel’s next-gen Meteor Lake CPUs: A game-changing 40-year architectural shift to rival Apple”
https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/laptops/intel-next-gen-meteor-lake-cpus-announcement
Surely Apple knew these changes were coming, and still elected to move to a custom version of the ARM cpus. That says a lot.
The future is very murky right now but, we may still see Windows desktops move to the ARM cpus.
WTH? What is going on in Plum Grove, Texas, Governor Abbott?
Just another proof that Tejas is being overrun by an invader. The county sheriffs have major problems dealing with the Colonias and often will not respond to calls except in force.
We have one in Fort Bend County that incorporated itself back in 1870 or so. It is a constant problem and is no longer allowed to have a police force due to corruption.
Just got this notice from BlueHost about Dr. P’s sites:
A bit confusing, and very alarming.
I had noticed that BlueHost a couple days ago that they did not have a shared hosting plan that allowed unlimited domains/websites. They used to. JustHost has the same ‘unlimited’ domains/websites on their advanced plan. BlueHost has gone to a max of 5 sites. JustHost still has plans with unlimited domains/websites, as of now, according to their site.
But JustHost is owned by the same company that owns BlueHost, I believe. And they share support staff. I suspect they also share data centers.
This warning from BlueHost is concerning, as my current hosting for my sites is JustHost. And I have 32 domains/websites on that plan. It will be a major issue if JustHost limits the number of sites.
Dr. Pournelle’s hosting account has 11 domains, although some are redirected to the ‘com’ site. And I have another client that has more than 6.
But if you have hosting at BlueHost, and more than 6 domains, you should be warned. I don’t know if this is going to be a trend. But it could be worrisome if it is.
There are other hosting places, of course. But some don’t have an unlimited domain availability on their plans.
>> Hot and dry is back in Austin this week so the entire grid will be strained every evening as the dweebs plug in their Tonymobiles and crank the AC to 72.
Why not just leave it at 68?
I am currently running W11 on ARM through Parallels on my MacBook Air. It would not be much of a stretch for Windows to deploy to ARM on the desktop. The biggest issue is the software that people install. There are some applications that will not run on ARM and that is going to cause some grief. The stuff I need runs.
I had noticed that BlueHost a couple days ago that they did not have a shared hosting plan that allowed unlimited domains/websites. They used to. JustHost has the same ‘unlimited’ domains/websites on their advanced plan. BlueHost has gone to a max of 5 sites. JustHost still has plans with unlimited domains/websites, as of now, according to their site.
They are tired of their shared servers getting overloaded. If you have more than five sites, they want you to move to a dedicated server. I got forced into moving to a dedicated server over a shared server by the frequent attacks on my main website. I jumped before they got nasty about me killing the shared server at Pair Networks after the 5th or 6th attack.
My dedicated server costs $310/month and acts just like a shared server except I am the only user. It is just another cost of running my main business. But, I am looking at all my costs now.
That cost is not going to happen at my house. That’s probably more per month than I make in six months via affiliate revenue and a handful of donations. Plus I don’t need (or want) to do all the geeky stuff to manage the server.
For those places that are ‘hammering the bandwidth’, they can charge for more bandwidth. But the load of my sites on my shared server is like the difference between an extra handful of sand on the beach.
The same with Dr. Pournelle’s sites. Minimal bandwidth usage there. But his family is paying for the hosting costs. I just keep an eye on the site updates.
The cost of upgrading Dr P’s sites to the new hosting plan is $900 for a three year term. And no guarantee of unlimited sites after that period, according to the mail.
But I’ve got a client (the volunteer organization I mentioned a couple days ago) that is on BlueHost that might be affected. Not high volume sites, but lots of them. We shall see what happens with that client.
I love testing software; I enjoy anticipating stupid user input and allowing for it; I prefer writing error code messages which identify the cause of the error. Because of these I’m not the fastest programmer.
I have frequently created a “universal” input routine to catch bad input – correct it if possible so “l” becomes “1” in numeric fields, ignore it – clicking in “undefined areas” or validate it if is not a normal response – shutting down a long reporting program that has reached the report out point. Etc.
Apple keeps their options open with regard to x86_64. I have no doubt that there are Threadrippers running macOS in Cupertino.
What Apple clearly did not forsee is ChatGPT and Nvidia Hopper GPUs, which, AFAIK, only work with Intel.
Windows on ARM isn’t happening as long as the only vendor-neutral CPU option is Qualcomm’s garbage. Microsoft would have to produce a chip, and that would require an investment of time and money akin to what Apple has done building the capability here in Austin since Jobs passed.
Range day today. I practiced single shots from low ready at 7 yards. Iron sights; I’m not quite ready for red dots on my pistols.
I also practiced a little bit of “both eyes open”. It’s supposed to help with situational awareness and also highly recommended for when you switch to a red dot. My eyes need all the help they can get.
Groups opened up and shifted left when I did that. I may need more practice, or it may be I can’t learn that skill. I’ll try again later.
In any event, I noticed improvement at the end of the session.
Meanwhile, the black guy in the next lane was shooting post-it notes at 10 yards, and turning them into confetti. They started out with 4 bullseyes drawn on them.
Keeps you humble.
The western sections of Georgetown along Ronald Reagan Blvd north of Austin are fast becoming a form of Subcontinent colonia, developed by members of the community, except they aren’t slums … for now.
Unit tests are often an afterthought too anymore.
>> Amazon just announced that they are hiring 250,000 employees for the holidays. Wow. Is Amazon closing in on Walmart ?
And firing 249,000 employees on January 15th.
“In your development code, you put a message like “Terminating due to missing data from frobozz”, where “frobozz” was a clear indication of what’s the matter.”
They’d clearly been playing too many hours of Zork. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork
Or more like 251,000.
“Zork” has been forgotten to the point that it didn’t even make the “Ready Player One” movie despite being an important part of the book.
Zork was a favorite pasttime with my first PC back in the mid-1980s.
Never did get it solved. I was always killed by a grue.
There’s a Zork app (or was a while back) for your phone. It might still be on my phone, but I haven’t played it for a long time.
Because of the grues….
I’m sort of disappointed that nobody here has mentioned that today is “Talk Like a Pirate Day”.
Eh, nobody ever does anything for it. I tried a couple times to get the development team at work to dress up like pirates or get something else going but no one played along other than a couple half-hearted “Yarr, ye scallywags”.
Frotz was an early port to the iPhone once Jobs relented on making a real compiler available.
Most Linux distributions have a version available via Apt (Debian) or Dnf (Fedora/Red Hat).
apt-get install frotz
dnf install frotz
The interpreter needs the game files, but those aren’t hard to find.
Infocom pioneered the concept of the virtual machine with the ports to the various home computers in the 80s.
I have frequently created a “universal” input routine to catch bad input – correct it if possible so “l” becomes “1” in numeric fields, ignore it – clicking in “undefined areas” or validate it if is not a normal response – shutting down a long reporting program that has reached the report out point. Etc.
I always read in numbers as strings and process them accordingly. People put the strangest things in numeric entry fields.
Dave Barry, who first brought attention to the holiday, didn’t forget.
https://blogs.herald.com/dave_barrys_blog/2023/09/today-be-the-day-me-hearties.html
>> Just got this notice from BlueHost about Dr. P’s sites:
@RickH, any impact to this or Barbara’s site?
Apple keeps their options open with regard to x86_64. I have no doubt that there are Threadrippers running macOS in Cupertino.
I don’t think that Apple would ever run AMD cpus. Too power hungry.
Intel is putting AI instructions in all future cpus. They are selling out for AI and gonna be fast.
Windows has been running on ARM cpus for years. I cannot remember the name of the laptop or tablet that MS sold and then abandoned.
Hmm…
https://ktla.com/morning-news/disney-to-invest-close-to-60b-to-expand-its-parks-and-cruises/
No impact here – this place is hosted by Dreamhost. And there are only 3 domains being hosted on the account.
May have impact on Dr. Pournelle’s various sites. He has more than six domains. Will have a big effect on my personal sites – since I have 30 domains/sites; but my hosting place is JustHost (sister company to BlueHost).
Still investigating the impact there, as the BlueHost email is not clear as to what a ‘domain’ and ‘site’ are. If you have a NET/ORG domain that is configured to point to the COM folder, is that one or three sites?
Huh. just won what looks like my exact PC and the auction is only a few blocks away. I can pickup tomorrow. Maybe I can just move the drives…
n
It isn’t a question of whether Windows will run on ARM, but whether any major vendor will make the commitment.
With what money? They’re turning over the couch cushions in Burbank looking for spare change to pay for Hulu now.
These are the death throes of the Walt Disney Company as currently structured.
Unfortunately for The Mouse, Coach Prime doesn’t play every night.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/ncaafb/deion-sanders-has-colorado-dominating-college-football-tv-ratings/ar-AA1gWZxh
ABC has Saturday’s game at Oregon. Linear TV has ad rates which can go up based on potential viewers. Imagine.
Another item to look for at estate sales…
https://www.theverge.com/22801890/sunbeam-radiant-control-toaster-t20-t35-vista
The modern version uses AI to determine when the bread is toast, and does the actual toasting using the 100kW of waste heat from the CPU’s.
hmmmm…
Could you build an AI cooled entirely by toast?
scratch…scratch…
Only if everyone in NYC goes on a toast diet.
8 GPU. H100. 3 kW idle. 10 kW max.
Calling cutting edge computer software AI is deceptive. As has already been proven, it’s not really intelligent at all, and in many cases is not even a modestly successful imitation of intelligence.
I propose we call it what it really is: AIS, for Artificial Intelligence and Stupidity.
we can’t get the stupid out of people, why do we think we can get the stupid out of machines?
n
It is, and has been, the standard since at least 1970.
Dr. Donald Michie, who taught my class in 1976 in a class called “Topics in Artificial Intelligence using examples from computer chess”, said one definition of AI is: problems we can’t definitively solve – yet.
Because as soon as we solve them, it’s no longer AI. It’s a solved problem, with lectures and textbooks and reference material you can learn from.
In 1976, these were considered unsolved AI problems: Natural Language processing (of text!), text to speech, speech to text, OCR, and Master-level chess.
As you come closer and closer to solving those, they move from “AI” to “cutting edge software” to “undergraduate problems”.
I have access to all of those on my cell phone today. Well, I could, if I cared to. Alexa/Siri cover the first three.
Ok, I am wiped. One of the companies brought in a husband and wife, each with a piano. They playe for five hours. Queen to Styx to GNR to Lady Gaga to Miley Cyrus, all requests by the crowd.
I stood the entire time. My dogs are barking. No, howling.
Still investigating the impact there, as the BlueHost email is not clear as to what a ‘domain’ and ‘site’ are. If you have a NET/ORG domain that is configured to point to the COM folder, is that one or three sites?
It depends. Each domain requires a name record, a mx record, etc in the domain name server. Looking at it from the DNS side, that is three domains for .com, .org, and .net, even if they point to the same place.
Calling cutting edge computer software AI is deceptive. As has already been proven, it’s not really intelligent at all, and in many cases is not even a modestly successful imitation of intelligence.
I propose we call it what it really is: AIS, for Artificial Intelligence and Stupidity.
My understanding of AI is that it is very fancy ladder logic. Very fancy with a full GPT system using 30+ TB of disk space. Storage Review is reviewing the systems, the specs are scary.
Wow, just added a printer to this Mint Linux box, and it was easy, fast, and seamless.
Took only a couple of clicks, and less than a minute. Faster than the last time I added a printer under windows, actually.
That is a HUGE improvement over my last attempt.
n