November 12th, 2023

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies

November 12th, 2023

“We are experiencing an unusually large volume of calls at the moment. We apologise for the delay.  Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in turn.”

My friend Andy Stanford-Clark was complaining about this on Twitter, 

“No, there are an unexpectedly low number of people answering the phones at the moment. Don’t blame your customers for your organisational inefficiency. Thank you.”

I’ve talked about this before: some organisations seem to have this as a standard disclaimer on the beginning of every call you make to them, which means it is blatantly untrue: how ‘unexpected’ or ‘unusual’ can the volume of calls really be?

No, what this really means is, “We consider our time to be more valuable than yours.”  Even though your call is really important to us.

(Sometimes, though, these automated messages can be helpful.   When they say, “This call may be recorded for monitoring and training purposes”, I say, “Thank you!”, and click the record button.)

Now I’m considering, when they do finally connect, playing a recorded message that says, “I’m experiencing an unexpected number of answers at this time. My call is important to you, so please hold, and a valued customer will be with you shortly.”  Repeated a few times, of course, but interspersed with some upbeat yet calming music.

Possibly-related posts:

Staying Dry and Stealthy

November 12th, 2023

I’ve always been a little bit of a Gore-Tex skeptic.  While I have owned, and do currently own, several garments and shoes incorporating the fabric, I’ve always felt a little bit let-down by it.

“If this is both waterproof and breathable”, I would ask myself as I ascended the hill in a slight drizzle, “then why are my shoulders getting rather wet?”

So I was interested to come across this rather fun video by a Canadian biking gear company, which talks about the history of Gore-Tex, how it works, what it can and can’t do, and why even the manufacturer doesn’t really use traditional Gore-Tex any more.

A quick summary is that it’s waterproof OR breathable, but not both at the same time.  Which is fairly predictable… and still gives it an advantage over something that is, say, purely waterproof… but do watch the video.

~

This ties in with something I was told in a shop recently when buying a new jacket.  I was complaining about my previous one not seeming to keep me dry for very long, and wondered if I was affecting the waterproofing by washing it too frequently.

Actually, they said, it might come from not washing it frequently enough.  And that would tie in with the assertions in the video; it seems that the key to successful Gore-Tex use is to make sure the water beads up and runs off quickly, so it doesn’t have to be simultaneously waterproof and breathable. To do this, you need to wash it in something that will top up the water-repellent coating.

So if you do decide to pay the Gore-Tex premium, be prepared for the Tech Wash premium in the years to follow.

My favourite jackets, by the way, have been made of Ventile, which is also not cheap, and doesn’t claim to be completely waterproof, so it’s not necessarily ideal if, say, you’re heading for Wales!  It’s hardwearing and exceedingly comfortable, though, and popular amongst birdwatchers, because it doesn’t rustle like most other fabrics and give away your location.  

It’s probably useful for secret agents too, for the same reason.  I couldn’t possibly comment.  I pretend that I have mine for dog-walking.

 

Possibly-related posts:

November 5th, 2023

A work of art is never finished

November 5th, 2023

“A work of art”, so the saying goes, “is never finished, merely abandoned.”

This assertion rings true in many artistic spheres, to the extent that I’ve seen variations attributed to people as diverse as Leonardo da Vinci and W.H.Auden.

Paul ValeryThe site ‘Quote Investigator’ suggests that it actually originated in a 1933 essay by the poet Paul Valéry:

Aux yeux de ces amateurs d’inquiétude et de perfection, un ouvrage n’est jamais achevé, – mot qui pour eux n’a aucun sens, – mais abandonné …

 and they offer this approximate translation:

In the eyes of those who anxiously seek perfection, a work is never truly completed—a word that for them has no sense—but abandoned …

My knowledge of French idiom falls short of telling me how significant Valéry’s use of the word ‘amateur’ is, though. Is he saying that it’s the professionals who really know when a work is complete?

~

Anyway, the same original core assertion is sometime used when speaking of software: that it’s never finished, only abandoned.

It’s rare that any programmer deems his code to be complete and bug-free, which is why Donald Knuth got such attention and respect when he offered cheques to anyone finding bugs in his TeX typesetting system (released initially in the late 70s, and still widely-used today).  The value of the cheques was not large… they started at $2.56, which is 2^8 cents, but the value would double each year as long as errors were still found. That takes some confidence!  

He was building on the model he’d employed earlier for his books, most notably his epic work, The Art of Computer Programming. Any errors found would be corrected in the next edition. It’s a very good way to get diligent proofreaders.

Being Donald Knuth does give you some advantages when employing such a scheme, though, which others might want to consider before trying it themselves: first, there are likely to be very few errors to begin with.  And second, actually receiving one of these cheques became a badge of honour, to the extent that many recipients framed them and put them on the wall, rather than actually cashing them!

For the rest of us, though, there’s that old distinction between hardware and software:

Hardware eventually fails.  Software eventually works.

~

I was thinking of all this after coming across a short but pleasing article by Jose Gilgado: The Beauty of Finished Software.  He gives the example of WordStar 4, which, for younger readers, was released in the early 80s.  It came before WordPerfect, which came before Microsoft Word.  Older readers like me can still remember some of the keystrokes.  Anyway, the author George R.R. Martin, who apparently wrote the books on which Game of Thrones is based, still uses it.

Excerpt from the article:

Why would someone use such an old piece of software to write over 5,000 pages? I love how he puts it:

“It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn’t do anything else. I don’t want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type up a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don’t want a capital, if I’d wanted a capital, I would have typed the capital.”

— George R.R. Martin

This program embodies the concept of finished software — a software you can use forever with no unneeded changes.

Finished software is software that’s not expected to change, and that’s a feature! You can rely on it to do some real work.

Once you get used to the software, once the software works for you, you don’t need to learn anything new; the interface will exactly be the same, and all your files will stay relevant. No migrations, no new payments, no new changes.

 

I’m not sure that WordStar was ever ‘finished’ , in the sense that version 4 was followed by several later versions, but these were the days when you bought software in a box that you put on a shelf after installing it from the included floppies.  You didn’t expect it to receive any further updates over-the-air.  It had to be good enough to fulfill its purpose at the time of release, and do so for a considerable period.

Publishing an update was an expensive process back then, and we often think that the ease which we can do so now is a sign of progress.  I wonder…

Do read the rest of the post.

Possibly-related posts:

November 2nd, 2023

Bureaucratic daftness

November 2nd, 2023

Bemused by two examples today of silly things that big organisations do:

  • A letter arrived from the NHS for a friend with information about an important and urgent medical appointment, which was sent by second-class post. “Please contact us on this number”, it said, “if you haven’t heard from the hospital by the 2nd November”.  It arrived on the 2nd November.  

  • A financial institution says it needs certified copies of three months of my bank statements.   That means I need to go and show them to a neighbour who will sign them to say they are true copies of the original, and then I can scan and send them.  But it’s been years since we received our bank statements on paper, so I will be printing out a PDF for them to sign.  Are they signing it to say that my printer hasn’t made a mistake?  In that case, what about my scanner?   But I checked, and yes, that’s really what the institution concerned wants me to do.

    So I will send both the scan of the signed printout of the original PDF asserting that it is indeed a true copy of the original PDF… and the original PDF.

Imagine if I actually had anything else to do, like earning a living…!

Possibly-related posts:

October 25th, 2023

Meta-Schrodinger

October 25th, 2023

Spotted on Mastodon, by Michael Marshall:

Schrodinger’s cat is now so ubiquitous a reference that it’s often used by people who don’t actually understand it or what it even means.

And you can only tell if they really do understand by waiting to see what they say next about it, to see if that demonstrates any further understanding.

But until that next thing is said, it’s impossible to tell. So they essentially exist in a superposition of both getting and not getting the reference.

Possibly-related posts:

  • Proboscidea I’ve started playing a bit more with Mastodon. For some...
  • Antisocial behaviour? There was a time when I perused Facebook and Twitter...
  • Party pics Michael took some great photos of the Counterfeit Guest launch...
  • Bogus blueberries Michael reveals The Great Dried Fruit Conspiracy. Enjoyed this post?...
October 22nd, 2023

Dumb switches and smart lights?

October 22nd, 2023

Almost all of our lights are now ‘smart’: controllable by software, timers, motion sensors etc as well as switches.

If you’ve done this, though, you’ll know there’s a problem: how do you stop people turning things off at the wall, at which point your smart lights become remarkably dumb?

Here’s how I do it:

(Direct link)

Possibly-related posts:

October 12th, 2023

Overchoice and How to Avoid it

October 12th, 2023

Do you ever find yourself agonising over two very similar items on Amazon, wondering whether you should by the one that has 0.3 more stars but is 30% more expensive? And what about other more major decisions, in this world where we often have so much choice?

In a nice article entitled Overchoice and How to Avoid it, Gurwinder says:

The best way to manage the myriad decisions of the modern age is by employing “philosophical razors,” so-called because they shave away options, simplifying choices.

Naturally, there’s an overwhelming range of razors to choose from. I’ve tried scores of them, and have found that most aren’t workable, either because they lead to poor decisions or they’re too complicated for everyday decisions.

A few, though, have proven indispensable. Here are the five I use most.

Read on.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for the link. As Charles suggests, you probably need to write these down somewhere prominent to get in the habit of using them!

Possibly-related posts:

October 10th, 2023

Forms of address

October 10th, 2023

Here’s a rather pleasing collection of UK address oddities by Paul Plowman.

In the US, it’s common for house numbers to be quite large – my parents-in-law used to live at 18325 Robert St, for example – but that’s because the first two or three digits are the block number, and the numbers aren’t contiguous within the block, so you can build more houses in the gaps if you want to and renumber very little.

But what do you think is the highest house number in the UK? This (and other entertaining facts) can be found in Paul’s blog post.

Thanks to Doug Clow for the link.

Possibly-related posts:

September 25th, 2023

Charging your car without draining your house

September 25th, 2023

If you have an electric car, and a home battery as well, you may have the problem that charging your car drains your house battery.

I’ve had a few queries after some of my other videos about how I avoid this, so here you go:

(Direct link)

Possibly-related posts:

September 22nd, 2023

Hippy fruit

September 22nd, 2023

“Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is!”

Most of my readers, I’m sure, will be familiar with this question, but if you happen to live far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy, you may have trouble with the vernacular and so appreciate the helpful notes provided in The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.

And if you don’t know why the towel is significant… well, there’s probably no hope for you. Better stick to your own planet.

Everyone else, though, will appreciate the importance of that most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor, so why, I ask myself, did my iOS spellchecker have so much trouble today with the simple phrase ‘sass that hoopy frood’?  It offered me hippy fruit and hoppy food and generally had as much trouble as a Nutrimatic machine trying to make a decent cup of tea.

Surely, all computers should incorporate the works of Douglas Adams in their basic training?  Come on Apple, you’re missing a trick here, especially since Douglas was one of your biggest fans.  What did you use? The Encyclopedia Galactica, for heaven’s sake?

I’m pleased to say, however, that ChatGPT is an improvement, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian Siri in having some idea of what’s going on in the universe.

Result of asking ChatGPT "Hey, you sass any hoopy froods?"

Possibly-related posts:

September 21st, 2023

With great power…

September 21st, 2023

Back in the early days of USB, my friend Andy Fisher and I were bemoaning some of its design flaws as a communication system.  “But”, he pointed out, “USB is the first universal power standard”.   I laughed, and agreed. People didn’t really think of USB as a power source very much then, so this was an interesting observation.  

Andy and I were doing a lot of flying to places with different mains power standards, and we had phones from people like Nokia and Motorola, so we had to carry lots of chargers with a wide range of connectors and adaptors everywhere we went.  The idea of a predictable socket giving you predictable power was very appealing, even if it was only 5V at 1A. (Though I later realised there was perhaps one earlier holder of the ‘universal power standard’ title: the car cigarette-lighter socket.)

Screenshot 2023 09 21 at 09 38 18This week the news is full of the fact that Apple are switching the iPhone to use USB-C.  This is assumed to be largely the result of EU directives compelling them to do so, but my latest iPad and laptop from them are already USB-C, so it was probably inevitable anyway.  Personally, the ‘Lightning’ cable has always worked very well for me; I’ve never had one fail and on the rare occasions when I plug it in my phone and it doesn’t charge, the solution is invariably to remove the pocket-fluff in the socket (which, by the way, is best done with a wooden cocktail stick).  So for many people, whether you approve of the change probably depends on whether you have bought lots of Lightning-based accessories in the past, and how that balances for you against not having to do so in the future!

USB-C, on the higher-end phones, will give much faster transfer rates, which is important for those copying substantial video clips to their laptops, but probably irrelevant for most other people.  And USB cables can be highly confusing, because you can run other protocols over them alongside the USB communications; DisplayPort being a key example, but also including things like Thunderbolt and PCI Express.  When you plug a cable between two USB-C sockets, therefore, it can be hard to know what you’ll actually achieve: the projector in this meeting room has a USB-C socket, but will that allow me to display my presentation or just charge the remote control?  Might it even recharge my laptop for me?  Make sure you try it in advance, because you can’t tell from the sockets, and it may also depend on the quality of cable you use to connect them.  Plugging things together will almost certainly be a safe operation, but it may be a disappointing one.

Sometimes, though, you can get a pleasant surprise.  I remember when I wanted to connect a small stick-type computer to my monitor, and plugged in a USB-C cable to provide the DisplayPort video connection, only to find the computer booting up because the monitor was also able to power it, through that same single cable.

And while I still regularly complain about USB in general — I have two or three hubs on my desk to connect all my peripherals, from reputable manufacturers, yet I regularly get messages about some external drive being improperly disconnected, or find some camera needs unplugging and replugging before it appears in Zoom —  I do have to admit that USB-C, at least from the ‘universal power standard’ viewpoint, does seem to work rather well, so I’m in favour of this change for technical reasons, as well as environmental ones.

If you want to know more about USB-C power, what it can do and how it does it, I recommend this Hackaday article by Arya Voronova.  He points out that there are still some issues — if you plug your battery power pack into your laptop, for example, do you expect the laptop to charge the battery, or the other way around? — but overall, it does seem like progress.

The shelf behind me in my study has three large boxes labelled ‘Power Supplies < 12V’, ‘Power Supplies 12V’ and ‘Power Supplies >12v’, because I always hated throwing them away.  In the past, power supplies generally died more regularly than the things they were powering, and it was very satisfying to be able to reach into one of these boxes and give a computer, drive enclosure or ethernet switch a new lease of life.

But I think it may be time for a clear-out.

PSU boxes

I now have a reasonable number of adaptors to connect USB-A to USB-C sockets and vice versa, and this should work in most simple cases. But you’ll get the lowest common denominator of the two standards, which may not be enough. Just last week, I was installing a new phone mount in my campervan; one that would hold my phone in place magnetically and charge it wirelessly. The Magsafe wireless charger came with a USB-C cable and I just plugged it, via an adaptor into to the USB socket on my dashboard. But… Nada. It turns out that the wireless charger needs more power than a standard USB-A socket can provide. I did actually need to plug it into USB-C.

Fortunately, that was easy to solve. Because my dashboard is also fitted with the original universal power standard. A cigarette lighter socket.

Car usb c adapter for 12v lighter socket

Possibly-related posts:

September 20th, 2023

Feeds

RSS  RSS feed

Categories

November 2024
M T W T F S S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
252627282930  

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser